Annual Report



The Assignment
For your final assignment, I want you to write an Annual Report. As I mentioned in class, I want this report to be for an organization that you have personal contact with. It might be a small business you work for or that you or a family member or friend owns. It might be for a group that you belong to. Ordinarily, organizations of this nature don’t write Annual Reports, but doing so, can give you a greater insight into the nature of Annual Reports as well as to what really happens within the organization.

What should you be doing?
Again, I don’t expect you to present the kinds of financial statements that serve the compliance part of Annual Reports. I want you to focus on the “marketing/public relations” part of the report. To do so, you’ll need to look at what the organization is. How it sees itself. How it wants to be perceived by the public. Since it’s an “annual” report, you’ll want to concentrate on the organization’s accomplishments during the reporting year. Depending on the nature of the organization, some of those accomplishments might be financial, some might have to do with personnel, some might have to do with community outreach, and so on.

Format
It’s hard to prescribe a format. As you may have noticed in looking at the samples I showed in class, different organization choose to present their Annual Reports in different ways. Clearly, if you can somehow find a way to help the presentation reflect the nature of your organization, you’re going to be on the right track.

However, if you simply need direction and guidance, I’d suggest you think about producing a document in the neighborhood of five to six highly formatted pages. Feel free to use appropriate graphics. If your organization has a logo, I would expect you would find a way to use it.

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