Show Your “Why”: How an Annual Report Can Amplify Your Organization’s Impact and Values
By Sarah Mote
An annual report can be more than a summary of the year’s accomplishments or a pie chart of financial data.
Annual reports—or “impact reports,” as M-AAA prefers to call ours—are a powerful tool for showcasing your organization’s mission and values while strengthening your organizational identity through impactful, visual, and emotional storytelling.
Whether your audience includes funders, board members, stakeholders—or even is so aspirational as to reach out to the general art-loving public—an annual report can effectively communicate your successes and aspirations while building awareness and inviting engagement.
View our FY24 Impact Report.
Impact reports can:
- Demonstrate your investment and impact
- Reinforce your organization’s values
- Empower board members as ambassadors
- Show your region’s vitality and vibrance
- Encourage donations and investments
Here’s how:
Demonstrate your investment and impact
Traditionally, the standard purview of annual reports is to detail your organization’s activities throughout the preceding year, providing readers—funders, potential donors, board members, and stakeholders—with information about your operations and financial performance.
How we approached it:
M-AAA’s FY24 Impact Report checks this box. For our numerically motivated audience, we provide a link to a PDF right at the top of the report that details our income, revenues, and expenses.
But we also took the opportunity to communicate our impact and investment over time and across our region.
Just below the letter from our CEO and board chair, we highlight our historic investment. Since 1972, M-AAA has directly invested over $60,000,000 in the arts, awarded over 20,000 grants, and served over 86,000,000 people.
And if you scroll down just a bit further, you’ll also see an interactive map that details our FY24 investment by state. In fiscal year 2024, you’ll see that M-AAA invested $6,075,025 across our region, with 969 grants and across 157 communities. You can further filter that data by each state in our six-state region of Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Photo courtesy of Culture of Health–Advancing Together (CHAT).
Reinforce your organization’s values
Through strategic storytelling, annual reports can not only provide a round up of the past year’s activities, but also illustrate your organization’s values and strategic priorities.
How we approached it:
In fiscal year 2024 (July 1, 2023, through June 30, 2024), M-AAA published more than 70 stories about our region’s artists and arts organizations, about M-AAA’s grants and professional development opportunities, about our funders, and in celebration of our investments in the arts, artists, and communities.
At a granular level, it’s a lot, but when you curate them thematically, these stories help demonstrate our “why”—to provide more art to more people, to all people.
While the arts and creativity are strong economic drivers for our local and regional communities, they also feed our soul. In the words of NEA Chair Dr. Maria Rosario Jackson, “The arts lift up our humanity, allow us to deliver the gifts we have to the world, and allow us to care for each other.”
Click on the squares at the of the page to jump to our stories where artists and arts leaders testify to the power of art, showing how the arts intersect with all aspects of our lives to build resilience, foster community and social connectedness, empower leaders, and celebrate culture and place.
Empower board members as ambassadors
As an object—either a printed piece or a digital landing page—impact reports provide a record of your activities and a document of your organizational passion and commitment. Sharing that story widely, with board members, donors, with your community, can help build awareness and visibility for your work and your impact.
How we approached it:
M-AAA’s impact report is a hybrid beast: part annual report, part impact report, part brochure. As such, it serves as a hub of recent activity, our historic investment in the arts, and of who we are and what we do.
It’s a shame to let that just sit on the interwebs all by its lonesome.
That’s why we developed a toolkit with ready-made messaging, images, and talking points to help our board members share our mutual work and investment with their communities, and then ask them to commit to sharing it with five people or organizations. The goal: build the thing and then make it very easy to share it via social or email.
Houston ARPA grant recipient Dance of Asian America. Photo courtesy of Dance of Asian America.
Show your region’s vitality and vibrance
Never a number without a story or a story without a number, and neither without a picture . . .
Again, in print or on the web, annual reports give you a chance to not just tell people about your organization and its activities, but to show it through stories, graphs, and pictures.
How we approached it:
When we first floated the idea of refreshing our annual report, we sat down with our members to talk about what they, as donors, would want to see in the report.
Top on the list of annual report desirables:
- Give voice to grassroots artists and arts communities
- Provide a sense of place, show the beauty and uniqueness of our region’s art and artists
- Show our region’s vitality and vibrancy
That’s why you’ll see us lean heavily into to video that gives voice to those artists, organizations we’ve invested in through our grant programs. They share the impact of the funding on their practice and in their organizations, and there’s no more compelling testimonial to the power of our work and the power of the arts than that.
We also wanted to make sure that we reflect the diversity of our region: the artistic disciplines that thrive here (music, film, painting, pottery) and the diversity of our landscape (longleaf pine forests, cityscapes, rivers, plains).
Watch the video about M-AAA’s Artistic Innovations grant recipient Loop38
Encourage donations and investments
Never a number without a story or a story without a number, and neither without a picture . . . and always an action.
Annual reports certainly report on how and where we invested the dollars entrusted to us by our board members, our donors, our regional and national funders. Through this report, we hope our stories build awareness for our organization and trust for our stewardship.
How we approached it:
We provide two options to engage with us at the bottom of our report. We’d love for folks to subscribe to our newsletter to track our stories, activity, and investments all through the year. And we also offer an opportunity to support our work through donation.
But more than that, we hope that these stories demonstrate the importance, necessity, and power of the arts, encouraging others to demonstrate their commitment to local artists and arts organizations, whether that’s with Mid-America Arts Alliance or through their support of another transformative organization in their community.
Know a story from our region that needs to be told?
Pitch us a story: If you know an artist or creative, a storyteller, an organization involved in the arts, or a region that is building their arts ecosystem that you’d like to pitch for a story, we’d love to hear about it and consider it for a future feature.
Are you creative? M-AAA is also looking for writers, photographers, illustrators, and videographers in our region, who can help us elevate and amplify creativity in the heartland. If you’re interested in becoming part of our storyteller network, email communications@maaa.org with a short bio, your location, and a few work samples.