PwC’s Building Public Trust Awards 2022 provide valuable learning and case studies for charities that want to go beyond compliance and build trust through clear and engaging reporting.
For the second year running, Age UK’s 2020-21 annual report won the Charities Award for building trust with the public through open, fair and insightful reporting and communications, while Oxfam and the NSPCC were highly commended for their annual reports.
I always recommend that even small charities look at the accounts of award-winning large charities for inspiration. Of course, most small charities have resource constraints and need to prioritise those areas that are most important to the readers of their accounts, but best practice examples can help inspire reporting that even smaller charities can easily implement, such as including staff Q&As that bring the charity’s work to life.
Who reads your charity’s annual report?
Key themes and best practice
Following the Building Public Trust Awards 2022, PwC shared some of the key themes and best practice examples to achieve clear and engaging charity reports:
- Charitable purpose and strategy: Engaging reporting creates a clear link between the charitable objectives set out at the beginning of the report and the narrative reporting throughout. Graphics, colour schemes and charts can help to communicate the charity’s purpose and strategy in the context of its wider vision, values and impact. Linking annual objectives and achievements to the longer-term strategic objective provides the context for the charity’s impact and achievements in the year and can be presented in a simple layout that even small charities can incorporate easily.
- Summary of key information: Annual reports of large charities are often long, and few readers will look at every page. That’s why it is becoming increasingly important that the annual report is easy to navigate, and that key information is presented in a concise and engaging summary, showcasing key figures with impactful graphics. How can you bring key information to life even if your charity doesn’t have a large communications team? Find guidance on infographics on the Information is Beautiful website and make your reports visually compelling.
- Key societal issues: Charities are not only judged by the value of their services but also their wider societal impact and organisational culture. This is reflected in annual reports with charities demonstrating their wider accountability and reporting on safeguarding, diversity and inclusion, gender and ethnicity pay gaps, senior management remuneration, and ESG impacts. Transparent reporting engenders trust because more information means less ambiguity. However, this requires consensus from key stakeholders across the organisation so that potential risks arising from increased transparency are managed.
Other areas where charity reporting is evolving include communicating how stakeholder engagement influences decision-making, reporting on risk management and compliance with the Charity Governance Code.
Evolving areas of focus in the next reporting cycle
The impact of the pandemic was a key topic in most annual reports of recent years. In the upcoming reporting cycle, inflation, rising energy prices and the cost-of-living crisis will be prominent. Charities will need to demonstrate their financial resilience to such pressures by clear reporting on their risk management approaches and financial strategies.
If, like me, you are a trustee of a smaller charity, your annual report may not be as glossy or colourful as the report of the Charities Award winner, Age UK, but there will be cost-effective opportunities to go beyond compliance and make incremental improvements to the areas that are most relevant to your primary audiences. What changes can you make to build trust with your charity’s next annual report?
Find out more about the learnings for charity reporting by reading PwC’s highlights from the Charity Reporting workshop following the Building Public Trust Awards 2022.