Project Update

Things are coming along swimmingly!

My write-up for annual reports and 990’s has started to become less an academic paper and more an article–which is sort of what I wanted it to become later. So. I think that’s okay.

I haven’t gotten into InDesign yet. I really have to buckle down and do that this week. The template is the important part of this project. I’m not exactly sure where to start with the software, though. Someone had mentioned in class that the SGA computers have the software on them. I’m going to spend some time today watching how-to videos before I get in there and start touching things.

So far, none of my plans have changed. I still want to have some written reasoning as to why nonprofit organizations should consider using an annual report instead of a 990 to communicate their year with their communities.

How I’m Going to Actually Write for Change

I’ve gotten very interested in the business side of the nonprofit world. I think because I didn’t realize that there really was one. I’ve been getting into business in general this semester, actually. Anyways.

I’ve decided to learn more about annual reports. What they do, who they’re for, what makes them different from other reports. Nonprofits do not generally produce these reports, so my research will be mainly regular businesses. The UCF Foundation, however, produces a really neat one every year, and I’ll definitely be able to access that and learn from it.

With this understanding of annual reports and my general knowledge of “business” in general, I’m hoping to be able to reach out to nonprofit organizations in my community (maybe farther!) to show them how this report can be helpful to them. The general consensus is that nonprofits don’t produce these reports because their donors and “society at large” feel like they’d rather their donation dollars/time go towards the mission directly. Basically, I want to show nonprofits that these annual reports can serve a purpose that does further their missions.

At the end of this project, I’d like to produce a template for an annual report that any nonprofit can use. This template will be provided free of charge and should be simple enough that a volunteer (or founding member) with any tech savvy can fill it with the correct information. For the purpose of my college class, I will be producing an analysis of these annual reports. My lofty-long-term-goal for this is to produce an article that I hope will make it in to one of the business-centric nonprofit publications–perhaps the Stanford Social Innovation Review or the Nonprofit Times!

I know that I have a lot of work ahead of me. Currently, I only barely understand an annual report when I read it. So. I’ll definitely need to learn to understand those. I’ve been told that InDesign is a great software tool for building web-based things; so I will be looking into learning that in order to create the template. I’m assuming a lot of my research will be done with the help of my good friend Google; I also plan on reaching out to the UCF Foundation for help understanding their annual report and the reasons they make it the way they do (it’s a really slick piece of work).

To set myself a schedule:
I plan to compile research on annual reports during this week. I will also be starting my analysis of these reports.
Next week, I will be setting aside some time to learn more about InDesign and possibly related software in order to build the template later.
The last two weeks will involve finalizing what I believe are the most necessary parts of an annual report for a nonprofit organization, finishing up that analysis (maybe starting that article!), and reaching out to some nonprofit organizations to see how they react to my template.
By the time I do my final presentation, I would like to have gotten at least one nonprofit on board with creating an annual report based on my template! Not just because it would make my presentation really easy if I could just stand in front of the class and say “They made this because I made this. The end.”

Hopefully this turns out to be something awesome and super helpful! Wish me luck!