Know your audience
This is really step one for any piece of comms work, and this is no different.
You should be asking yourself one questions “what is the audience looking to get out of this”. For example, when I write my quarterly reports in my current role, they get shared company wide so I like to make them accessible and as much as possible – enjoyable. I am a sick, sick man, and always try to get my co-workers excited about what algorithm changes have affected our digital strategies, and how this tech tycoons brain fart has impacted our 5 year plan. As such I need to make something that is impactful, but broadly accessible.
To this aim I use a very casual voice, I provide sector highlights to help build context, and I limit the use of charts and data unless they are easy to understand. As far as I am concerned, if I can’t get people inside a company interested in our marketing and communications, how am I qualified to lead campaigns?
Don’t bother pretending the reports are subjective
There’s this idea that reports should just be a big bag of information, and that your job is to just robotically plop this information onto a page for other people to make their own assumptions about. That’s the printers job, not yours. You are supposed to be the expert, and this report is you making and supporting an argument. I wouldn’t even consider being subtle about it. First paragraph, “This report shows X”.
Make the data accessible
This is one of my personal bugbears, but I have seen professionals get asked to report on a campaign, and they just hurl statistics at a word document and call it a day. Maybe they will go further, and add annotations “line go up good, sometimes go down, bad”. I have never understood this attitude. If I’m feeling charitable I think its because people haven’t been given clear instruction or don’t really know what the audience needs from a report. When I’m feeling less charitable, I think they are hoping to drown people in data, so they don’t get asked to do it again.
Either way, this helps no one. I like to open my reports explaining that data is open to interpretation, and my reports are simply me proposing how and why I am interpreting that data. I always give access to the data I’m using, and looker studio is really useful for building quick interactive dashboards to help people navigate it. I also always offer time to meet with me and discuss. If it turns out my arguments are strong, great! They will stand up to some interrogation, if they get picked apart, also great! We found some mistakes and now they can be amended before we act on them, and I get to learn something new.
Be passionate (or at least interested)
Saying reports can be dry, is like saying rain is often wet, or LinkedIn posts are occasionally insincere. I try to come from a place of curiosity. If something in the data catches your eye, write about it. You might have a few metrics you have to report on, but if you are seeing an interesting trend that is noteworthy, you are obligated to write about that too. Let your interest show in the way you write. Excitement can be infectious, and if you try to spark it in people through reports, you will make them more enjoyable to engage with.
I have been fortunate enough to be allowed to put a lot of my personality in the way I write reports, and I feel that makes them more interesting to read. But the bottom line is, if it’s a chore to write them, it will be a chore to read them.
Set your structure and stick to it
One of the most boring and well worn rules, but it is so for a reason. Think about every other point I’ve offered so far, and jam them into the structure of your report, then follow your structure. I like to set my structure as questions to answer, and honestly not particularly complicated ones. My most commonly applicable structure goes:
- What are we seeing
- Why should we care
- What should we do about it
This is simple, but it means you set the table for your reader. You start building your theory of events, you put that in a broader context and what it means for your organization, and crucially ends with ideas for next steps.