Know your audiences.
Summary:
• Broad or narrow audience?
• Skimmers or deep divers?
• Same story, different delivery
• Segmenting for clarity
With so much to report, how do you help your stakeholders find the information they specifically need? Ask yourself these questions: “Who needs what information?” and “What form best meets each audience’s needs?”.
Knowing your audience lets you adjust your narrative style, structure, language and tone to ensure that it is easily accessible and understood.
Your annual/integrated report audience
Very broad – including employees, media as well as investors and special interest groups. The report needs to be key message driven, carefully layered, highly accessible in both design and language. It’s primarily corporate storytelling, explaining how you create value for financial and non-financial stakeholders over the short, medium and long term and includes a topline on sustainability strategy and activity.
This report should be designed for two types of readers - skimmers and deep-sea divers. Format content to engage both groups. Use headlines, paragraph sub-heads, pull quotes, visuals and infographics for those who prefer to skim. For deep-sea divers, provide just enough substance as proof points to your strategic statements. Word of warning: ensure the overall outtake is the same for both! If you have an even deeper dive into Sustainability and ESG, either later in the report or as a separate document, your storytelling section can cross reference to this for richer data.
This document is a direct source of your corporate truth that a broad audience relies on and is your prime tool for building trust. As such, the narrative thread that forms the foundation of your story should become the core source for all other corporate statements to ensure consistency of messaging.
Tip: Distil your corporate story once, and repeat in different formats and different media, for different audiences. See Article 6.
Your sustainability/ESG report audience
Readers tend to be more analytical. They want data, and real clarity around your responsibility (sustainability), or a long term view of the financial risks that your activities (or lack of them) may impose on their investment (ESG). This report is more about information and the clarity of it than about storytelling, messaging hierarchy or engaging design. It needs a different tone of voice and different design techniques from the annual/integrated report. Combining everything in one report can create conflict and requires careful planning and some compromises between ‘communicating’ and ‘reporting’.
Key outtake: Segmenting your reporting thinking by audience groups creates clearer, more effective communication and a smoother process. We hope it’s a tool you find of value.
In Article 3, we explore the comparative wisdoms of a combined annual/sustainability report vs separate documents.
Let’s navigate your reporting requirements together.