Charity Impact Reports: What happens next? 

Charity impact reports have grown in popularity. With charity annual reports needing to include many pages of accounts, they are often not the best way to engage donors. Plus, sending out a heavy impact report adds to your postage costs and environmental impact. An impact report provides a shorter, more engaging way to show off your charity’s or non-profit’s achievements over the past year.

However, often these impact reports still end up as a downloadable PDF, hidden on an ‘about us’ page, collecting dust, or whatever the digital equivalent is! In this post, I will share why you should be sharing your impact report content in new ways, some suggestions on how to share that content effectively, and some great examples.

Why you should share your impact report more widely

1. Increased engagement on social media

You now have a bank of great statistics and stories about your work, of course, your social media followers will want to hear about them too. Stories in particular can be really engaging content for your social media channels.

You could translate your impact report content into a video, further increasing the chance of your audience emotionally engaging in your content online

The impact report content could also become great ‘evergreen’ social media posts. When you have a quiet week and you aren’t sure what to post, or if you are a one-person comms team needing to schedule content while on holiday, you will have some posts ready to go.

2. Efficiency

You have probably invested a lot of time in collating, writing and capturing the content for your impact report. It simply makes sense to reuse this across different channels. You may worry that this could be repetitive but it can take over five times of seeing something before your brain remembers it!

It isn’t just your time that you have invested either. If you have reached out to other stakeholders, including people who your charity helps to get case study content, it makes sense to reuse this too. Just make sure you ask for consent to use the content on other channels first.

3. New supporters

When new supporters first find out about your charity they may head straight to your website, but in 2024 it is just as (if not more) likely they will search for you on social media. Your impact report content is a great way to quickly communicate the incredible work you are doing, so why not have it front and centre, rather than hidden in your about us section as a downloadable document. 

By creating bespoke web content from your charity impact reports you can demonstrate the difference you make quickly. You can also use your Instagram page like a homepage, pinning your key content stats to the top of your page, or using story highlights to share your key areas of work.

4. Accessibility and SEO

Depending on how your PDF document has been designed and set up it may not be completely accessible for all audiences, and may not meet WCAG guidelines. There are ways to ensure that your PDFs are more accessible but if you are simply uploading a document intended for print, it may not have the required tagging to be readable by screen reader technologies. 

A responsive web page allows much more functionality for users. Some users may change the text size on their browsers or require increased colour contrast. Read more about why PDFs are not accessible.

PDF content can also affect your SEO. Search engines can read your PDFs, however as with accessibility, if you haven’t set things up with the right tagging, search engines won’t rank this content as high as an effectively designed webpage. You can also keep users on your main site and link through to other content easily with a webpage.

How to effectively share your charity impact reports

Hopefully, by now I have convinced you that it is worth taking your impact report PDF and reusing the content elsewhere, but where, and how? Here is a list of ideas to get you started:

Evergreen Social Media posts

You can use stats and infographics from your report to create evergreen content for Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin and X (Twitter). These could be static posts or animated graphics. Having these posts ready to go will help cover any quiet periods in your social media calendar. They could also be used for awareness days.

I created this Instagram post to share key statistics from a freedom of information inquiry report by the National Axial Spondyloarthritis Society. It shares the top-line information that the charity wants to draw attention to. Some people will just take this information away, and some may be interested in reading the full report, but this post is much more shareable to a wider audience than a lengthy report.

Social Media is also a great way to share any case studies or quotes from your impact report. Human stories do great on Instagram and Facebook. If possible, get a great photo of the person to create a human connection. While stats can demonstrate how many people your charity helps, sometimes individual stories can get lost. It is always worth highlighting the individual impact of your work. Below is an Instagram post I worked on as an example. Over 400 hours of volunteer time is a great statistic, but Tilly speaking about her experience adds depth and shows just how much impact that statistic can have on individuals.

Create an impact report video

Video can help you to increase your engagement on social media and improve your SEO. It is also a great way to condense a lot of information in an easily shareable format. An impact report video could be shared on social media, on your website, with donors or at events.

I love this impact report video from Kids Help Phone. This video shows that you don’t necessarily need to have loads of footage already to create a video. You can combine statistics and photos with animation to create a video that showcases the past year. It is also a great way to thank donors and corporate partners.

Ongoing updates

Impact reports are reflective and often tied to either the financial or calendar year. Unfortunately, this means that they can be out of date almost instantly! 

After your report has been released you should keep your supporters updated on the progress of any projects you have featured. Maybe you funded a new building or piece of equipment. Follow up with users in the future and talk to them about what difference it has made to their lives. 

You could do this on social media or with an email newsletter. Why not try getting back in touch with case studies from last year’s impact report and see where they at now? Cancer research charities are great at this as research can take a very long time to have a tangible impact.

Look to the future 

Another way to ensure your impact report is not just a reflective document is to use it to highlight areas in which your charity could be doing more than it already is, with more funding. Perhaps you are giving expert advice and support but are restricted by the number of staff on your helpline. 

You could develop one of the projects in your impact report into a direct mail appeal, showing the incredible work you have done already, and demonstrating how more donations could help you achieve more.

What happens next?

In summary, charity impact reports are a great way to share the incredible work of your non-profit organisation, but to get the most out of your report you should also consider ways to reuse content.

Not only will this be a way to increase engagement online, but it could also result in more donations, and save you time.

Header image by Freepik