Newsletter

Annual reports made simple

December 11, 2024

This article originally appeared in The Lenfest Institute’s Solution Set newsletter.

While many of us are busy looking ahead to 2025, this is now the perfect time to reflect on the year that’s been and assess what your organization has accomplished in 2024 through an annual impact report, which you can share with your staff, supporters, and broader community.

In addition to boosting morale amongst your team, annual reports are important tools for transparency among stakeholders, whether it be subscribers, members, donors, or the wider community your newsroom aims to serve. Reports can summarize your activities and accomplishments while sharing insights into key metrics and financial performance. It’s something we do each year at The Lenfest Institute, and it’s a great reminder for our team and those who support us on why we do the work that we do.

It’s not too late to pull together an impact report to be published in early 2025, so in our last issue of Solution Set for the year, we compiled a list of resources and examples to help you design your own impact report. While much of the focus is on nonprofits, for-profit newsrooms can also create annual reports to highlight their impact to the community.

Creating your annual report

Here are some guides, toolkits, and best practices for how to produce an annual report:

• National Council of Nonprofits – This guide includes the basics of identifying your audience, how you plan to reach them, and what you hope to accomplish through an impact report.

• Big Sea – A comprehensive impact report overview from a nonprofit consultancy, including frequently asked questions and tools you can use to build the report. It also has a guide to the key elements you’ll want in your report, including:

A cohesive storytelling framework

Message from leadership / mission statement

Annual activities / impact

Financial overview

List of contributors (including how you may want to recognize donors or members)

• The Flathead Beacon, a news organization serving Northwest Montana, shared its impact report template with the Reynolds Journalism Institute. It also included a list of questions the team asked when building the report. A few key elements which The Beacon included in its most recent report:

Testimonials from community members

Powerful visual journalism

Specific stories or beats that communicate its value proposition

A larger focus on qualitative and anecdotal data as opposed to subscribers or pageviews

• Storyraise – The company, which created a tool to help nonprofits create visually appealing reports, shared a guide to using infographics for annual reports.

Examples from newsrooms

Here are some outstanding annual impact reports produced by both nonprofit and for-profit newsrooms:

• The Daily Herald, which serves Everett and Snohomish County, Washington. Brenda Mann Harrison, the paper’s journalism development director, spoke with the Local Media Association on how the team crafts its report each year.

• The Detroit Free Press publishes a “Community Impact Report” each year that re-affirms its commitment to public service and thanks subscribers and supporters for empowering its journalism.

• The Baltimore Banner’s digital impact report uses Issuu to present the PDF file like a magazine that users can easily flip through.

• U.S.-based nonprofits are legally required to publicly report their financial results in a form 990, but an annual impact report should also be a space where news organizations provide some transparency and insight into their finances. The Sahan Journal’s most recent report offers a comprehensive financial breakdown.

• The Tampa Bay Times reports on all of its products and services, including other publications, marketing services, community partnerships, and more.

• Mother Jones publishes annual impact reports, but in 2024, it also included quarterly reports for spring, summer, and fall. The Marshall Project also publishes shorter, quarterly reports.

• The Guardian Foundation’s 2023/2024 report highlighted the organization’s mission, but it was designed in The Guardian’s style, which would feel familiar to readers.

Planning for 2025

This guide is a crash course of resources or examples for building an annual report right here, right now. But if you want to prevent the last-minute scramble, here are some resources to help make impact tracking a more consistent part of your workflows.

• International Journalists’ Network – Key questions to ask to start to introduce impact tracking to your newsroom

• Local Media Association – Tips from The Bureau of Investigative Journalism on factoring in impact tracking at every stage of your projects

• Impact Architects – A free Impact Tracker to help your newsroom move beyond quantitative metrics like pageviews. The tool will organize and display impact at the structural, community, and individual levels.

• The Lenfest Institute’s Statewide News Collective – A free guide on how to measure community impact through the use of a public opinion survey or how to use focus groups to gain similar insights into community impact, an approach that may be useful for organizations with more limited resources or staff time.