Your impact report should be exciting, not boring. After all, this is where your nonprofit takes center stage, showing your target audience how your efforts are making a real change. Impact reporting is a tried and true engagement tactic, one that deepens relationships with current and prospective donors, if executed well. The new standard: go digital. Digital reports are superior to their paper predecessors, often thumbed through and left to collect dust. And in our digital age, where undivided attention is a luxury, using technology is a necessity, no longer a nice-to-have.
You can use Storyraise Reports to create a dynamic digital product, complete with embedded videos, interactive polls, animated charts and more. This is where creativity and technology meet to help you produce reports that score, not bore.
Our team put together a behind-the-screens tour, made for nonprofit professionals like you. These are five benefits of using a digital impact report to engage your nonprofit audience.
💻 Make a report that can be read anywhere, even on your smartwatch
To meet people where they are — usually on their phones — your impact reports have to stun on big and small screens. Folks will comb through your report, similar to how they navigate a website. And count on them to see their way out if your report is slow to load, or is suffering from wonky-looking text or blurry images.
This is why Storyraise optimizes for desktop and mobile, ensuring all reports are sharp and accessible, no matter where your audience views them. Our reports are responsive, meaning text and visuals adapt to the screen size of your phone, laptop, tablet and even your smart watch. Compatibility helps you reach a wider audience, who can view and share your report whenever they want.
🎞️ Fundraise and friend-raise with multimedia storytelling
A picture is worth 1,000 words, sure. But a photo can’t hold a digital candle to multimedia, which is
worth a whole lot of words and money. Using multimedia to tell your nonprofit stories creates a richer, more immersive experience for your audience. Stories are most impactful — and can lead to big donations — when told via multiple modalities.
For example, if your nonprofit selected a handful of college students for a volunteer opportunity abroad, you may consider featuring a video of a participant speaking about their experience. Or maybe a photo gallery with action shots that show students hard at work. Or even an interactive map to pinpoint where participants traveled and what they did in each town or city.
To help you create an effective narrative, Storyraise Reports has a library of multimedia blocks, including:
Text
Videos
Photo galleries
Infographics
Audio clips
Data
Maps
Social media posts
All are intended to create a dynamic report, where multimedia is a forethought, not an afterthought. When visual formats and written words complement each other, people feel. And those feelings are crucial to nonprofit fundraising.
📈 Track reader behavior with hard numbers
A digital report is a measurable, trackable data source that helps you determine what your audience really cares about. Using analytics, you can monitor how folks interact with your digital report in real time. Are they watching one or all of your videos? Spending time reading the letter from your CEO or zooming right past it? Sharing your report with others?
With a few clicks in your Storyraise account, you’ll see which sections were a hit and which sections were neglected. Using those metrics, you can tailor future reports and optimize your overall marketing efforts.
📩 Customize your annual report for each major donor
The difference between one-time donors and long-term donors: your efforts to engage them. And customization is a magical source of engagement. When you craft a report that speaks directly to one giver, you can address their personal connection to your cause. This is story-tailoring, the most intimate form of storytelling. This is what deepens donor relationships.
With Storyraise, you can produce automatic, customized reports for each of your major donors. No extra hours tweaking language or visuals. Using information collected from your audience, we take note of what each person cares about and what has historically stirred them to support you.
🎁 Create a content arsenal that can be repurposed all year round
You can shed hours and save dollars by repurposing your impact report. Everything in it — yes, everything — can and should feed into your other marketing efforts. Post a video on Instagram. Include a story in an email to donors. The list goes on, including:
Social media
Direct mail
Email fundraising
Newsletters
Galas
Donor lunches
Speeches
Website
Speaking engagements
Monitor how folks interact with your digital report via analytics. Are they watching one or all of your videos? Are they sharing your report with others? Your digital report is a measurable, trackable data source that helps you determine what your audience really cares about.
📩 Customize your annual report for each major donor
Craft a report that speaks directly to each giver, addressing their personal connection to your cause. To create a series of customized reports, just upload your audience information to Storyraise Reports.
🎁 Create a content arsenal that can be repurposed all year round
Shed hours and save dollars by repurposing your impact report. Everything in it can and should feed into your other marketing efforts, from social posts to email newsletters to direct mail pieces.
To create your next digital impact report, visit storyraise.com, or join us on April 2 for a free webinar to learn more about this amazing new technology for nonprofits.
This is a guest blog post written by Shana Medel and provided by our friends at Storyraise.
