Extend Your Reach.
The expanding internet has most companies rethinking their marketing communications and branding strategies. The internet is changing corporate annual reports and investor relations in a dramatic way, too. A printed annual report reaches shareholders and potential investors weeks or months after the numbers have been filed with the SEC.

Traditionally, companies have used the annual report to discuss the recent past and to look forward: to assess market trends, product development plans, international expansion, and other vital topics. This information is essential to shareholders, employees, business partners, your customers, the media and others on your mailing list. Making it available online delivers the whole story about your company much earlier, and to a potentially much larger audience.

The tangibility and portability of print is here to stay!
Does this mean that printed annual reports aren't important? Absolutely not. There are simply too many people and purposes that require a printed document. Many people still prefer to stash a report in a briefcase, to hold a book in their hands, to leaf through at a leisurely pace.

A printed report is a handy reference tool, and you can highlight parts or add notes to it. Investment analysts describe how, paging through each year¹s mountain of annuals, they get valuable information about the culture and energy of a company by the way they distinguish themselves in print. Executives and sales people often rely on the annual as an important "leave behind" after get-acquainted meetings or group presentations. And for human resource managers, the annual is a valuable recruiting tool.

The SEC already puts our numbers online. Why do we need more? All public companies must file required reports with the SEC, and the data they contain is posted online as soon as they are filed. At websites such as FreeEDGAR.com, anyone in the world can find your company¹s 10-K, for example, and examine the information it presents.What they won¹t get, however, is the larger story about strategy, plans and progress.They also won¹t get the benefit of visual communication‹photographs, diagrams, charts and graphs‹that help explain these fundamental aspects of your business. Furthermore, using EDGAR is a non-interactive, one-dimensional way to get information. So one of the biggest opportunities in putting your annual online is to make it interactive and multidimensional.This will help make your company stand out from the crowd, by signalling the forward-looking leadership that people associate with superior corporate performance.

So who¹s the audience for interactive, online annuals?
The short answer is, everyone who matters to you. Here are some longer answers: Analysts, media, and public relations professionals know that annual reports are among the most reliable, up-to-date, and comprehensive of all corporate documents. Whether they need a telling statistic or want the "big picture," the online annual is the place they look. An interactive version can provide links to related information including sophisticated use of the web¹s multimedia capabilities ‹audio, video, and animation‹ dramatizing a company and its story in a way that print alone cannot achieve.

Public companies are attracting more individual investors than ever before, thanks to the web. These traders want fast, online access to information about interesting stocks, and EDGAR¹s dry facts and figures can¹t bring your company¹s story to life for them. Simply offering a PDF download of the annual may not go the distance either, because many people consider such downloads tedious or impractical.They want information now, and you want to respond just as immediately.

Recruiters and job-seekers are heavy web users.
The sophistication of an interactive annual is as important for recruiting as it is for promoting stock ownership. Many companies are growing by merger and acquisition and operating from offices around the globe. In any one office, employees may have a very limited view of their company¹s range of products and services and management¹s vision for the future. The interactive annual report is a powerful, and cost-effective, employee education tool. Potential customers review a company¹s web site as part of due diligence before committing to a major buy decision.

An easily accessible and carefully crafted
interactive annual report is a powerful calling card.
Among other things, it instantly demonstrates management leadership and vision. It is relatively inexpensive for global companies to translate their online annual into multiple languages. Only the text changes, while everything else remains in its original electronic form on the web server. The cost to print complete annual reports in many languages would be far higher. conti n u e d Should online and printed annuals appear identical, or different? The answer depends to a great extent on your company, your message, and the available opportunities for visualization and interactivity. That¹s why we start by analyzing these issues with each new annual. Certainly the underlying messages and visual language should be the same in both printed and online reports.

It¹s equally important, however, to take maximum advantage of the best qualities of each medium. A printed annual gives you the power of large-scale, dramatic images, for example, which can be vital in making memorable statements.The web, meanwhile, enables you to turn images of executives into video clips, graphs into animated slide shows, and customer photographs into multimedia testimonials. Print media tend to guide readers along a linear story path, which can help you explain complex ideas thoroughly.

On the other hand, an audio clip can dictate the tone and speed of communication with considerable precision, and the discipline of boiling down your text for web screens might help you find more concise, powerful ways to get your point across. In some cases,you may want to keep certain topics separate, such as the future potential of new products and their actual financial performance in their first year. Print supports this strategy well.

If you want people to drill down for explanations and make connections on their own, however, you may want to enrich your electronic annual with multiple hyper-links between topics. We can give you many other examples of how each medium works best, and how to get the most impact from each one. In the end, both your printed annual and your online annual have to produce the same result: better understanding of your company by members of your target audience. In short, it is worth the investment in time and money to produce both print and online versions of your annual report. It¹s best to develop both projects simultaneously, with all members of the team collaborating and contributing to both versions.You reap the benefits of economy of scale. And a consistent design and message will run through both versions to help you build a stronger, more memorable corporate image.

How can Modern Graphics help?
Making your annual report an asset online requires stepping back and taking in the bigger picture: investor relations priorities, corporate communications strategies, and existing visual identity elements. At Modern we bring a design consultancy approach that delivers an annual report that stands out in a crowd and speaks with clarity, intelligence, and your own distinctive corporate voice. Because we bring extensive experience in the full range of visual communications, we can advise and assist on a broad range of issues affecting your annual report: from planning, copywriting and design to printing and distribution. Some of our clients engage us first to elevate their annual report program, and then ask us to leverage that success into marketing and other communications programs. Other clients bring us their full-spectrum communication challenge and we work together to design and execute a comprehensive solution.