Annual Reports

Why most annual reports are not read

Most annual reports are produced, printed, and filed. The people who receive them read the financials and skim the rest. That is not a reader problem. It is a writing problem. When the narrative sections read like corporate boilerplate, nobody reads them. When they make a clear argument about what the organisation did and why it mattered, readers stay.

The challenge with annual reports is that they are typically produced by finance and legal teams, reviewed by multiple stakeholders with competing interests, and written under significant time pressure. The result is prose that satisfies every concern and says nothing. We write annual reports that make a case for the organisation to the people who receive them.

What we write in annual reports

The narrative sections are where annual reports succeed or fail. That includes the chairman or CEO letter, the business review, the strategy overview, the sustainability or ESG section, the portfolio company summaries, and any appendix text that is meant to be read rather than simply referenced. We do not write financial statements or auditor's reports. We write the copy that surrounds and contextualises them.

Our approach to annual reports

We begin with a stakeholder brief and review of previous years' reports. We then conduct audience research: who actually reads this document, at what point in their decision cycle, and what they need to take away from it. The writing is built around that understanding, not around what the organisation wants to say about itself.