It's summer so it must be annual report season in the nonprofit world. In the last couple of years, this has started to present a conundrum for many nonprofits. They spend so much time and (often) money writing and designing the annual report that there is a huge temptation to put a lot of effort into getting the beautiful printed report online in some flashy fashion. But is it really worth it?

Annual reports are really aimed at major donors, not your typical site visitors - and major donors typically have little or no interest in clicking through a microsite version of an annual report. Mark Rovner, the founder of Sea Change Strategies says "putting them online is arguably a worse idea. While we did the study that showed there are plenty of rich people online, the tactile and visual benefits of an annual report blow websites away in their capacity to inspire — we’ve tested it!"

In our experience working with nonprofits we've seen very little success with microsite annual reports. In one recent case, a group spent a fair bit of time and money to design an annual report microsite and promoted it fairly heavily to their email list. The end result? Less than triple digit site visits in 3 months and an avalanche of requests for a PDF version by major donors.

So how should your nonprofit post an annual report online? Probably the best way is to create a simple intro page with a few key highlights and a link to the full version as a PDF. But, it's also important to make sure when you design the annual report that you also create a version optimized for an online PDF. A good designer should be able to provide that easily. And if the basic PDF format isn't enough for you, there are services like Issuu that will turn your PDF into a flash-based reader. However, frequently the conversion isn't so smooth and the fonts' turn out small, pixelated, and jagged which is not very user friendly. Though again if you have a PDF optimized for the web, you may avoid many of those problems.

Whatever your nonprofit decides to do, it's important to remember who the real audience for annual reports are and how to give them what they want and quickly. As Rovner says, "I have been told by more than one major donor fundraiser that the single most important page in the book is the page on which the donor is mentioned by name." Make sure you spell it right :)

This article was co-written by Jared Seltzer, Founding Partner of Rad Campaign, an online communications firm that provides web design, web development, online marketing and strategy to nonprofit organizations and political campaigns.

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