Creating and Distributing Electronic Annual Reports and Marketing Materials

I've worked in a number of different offices, nearly all of which have a store room where old annual reports and marketing brochures are kept until they're finally tossed out. So much of this print collateral never gets used and it's a shame.

The good news is that it's not difficult to create electronic versions of annual reports and marketing materials that can be emailed, posted on Web sites, downloaded as PDF documents, or printed on demand when necessary.

If you're with a small nonprofit without much of a marketing or communications budget, you may be doing your marketing collateral yourself. For document layouts that aren't too complex, word processing programs like Microsoft Word can create a functional brochure, whitepaper, flyer, or even a simple annual report.

Desktop Publishing Considerations

• Pictures or graphic images dramatically increase the size of the document.
• Documents that are under 10 megabytes in size are emailable.
• Documents over 10 megabytes should be posted on a Web site, usually as a PDF document.
• To make documents useful for both viewing on a computer screen and for printing, use pictures or images that are at least 300 dpi (dots per inch). Web-only images can be lower dpi.

Photo and Image Manipulation Software

Working with pictures and images is a fairly deep subject, but it can be reasonably easy to make them larger, smaller, or to crop them with some software that manipulates pictures:

• Firefox - Screengrab! This is a free Firefox extension which makes it easy to capture a Web page or part of it as an image.
• Adobe InDesign and Photoshop Elements for PC and Mac are available for eligible nonprofits on TechSoup Stock for only a $15-$60 admin fee. Adobe InDesign is the industry standard software application for creating marketing documents, newsletters, and annual reports. It takes some training to learn it, but it allows non-professionals to create beautiful collateral materials. InDesign easily exports documents in PDF and Web page formats. Photoshop Elements is Adobe's consumer-grade photo package, with easy-to-use tools to edit, crop, and enhance images.
• GIMP is a free image manipulation program similar to Adobe Photoshop. It allows for advanced photo manipulation but can be somewhat more complicated to learn.
• Photofiltre is another free image manipulation program. It is simpler to use than GIMP.

Converting Documents to PDF

Regardless of what software application you use to create your marketing documents, it is easy to convert them to PDF format. PDF (Portable Document Format) documents are of course the standard format for basic digital documents. They can be simple or very complex. Many brands of printers now include an option to convert your document to PDF. If you don't have that on your computer here are two freeware applications for creating PDFs:

• Doc 2 PDF free online Microsoft Word to PDF Converter
• CutePDF Writer

Another option is to create professional looking PDFs is Adobe Acrobat Pro. It is available for a $45 admin fee to eligible nonprofits through TechSoup Stock. A good example of a complex PDF document is TechSoup Stock’s Catalog. Scroll down to 'Product Catalog' to view.

Annual Reports and eBooks

Annual reports are probably the most complex digital document that nonprofits usually create. Most people associate them with very slick corporate documents, but I like About.com’s great article, 10 Tips for Writing a Great (Nonprofit) Annual Report that get’s to the essential point of them. Find examples of other digital nonprofit annual reports at the Nonprofit Annual Report Gallery.

eBooks are an effective medium for long digital reports or documents. They have many advantages which include searchable text, readers can adjust text size and even the reading font, and text-to-speech software can be used to convert e-books to audio books automatically, making them widely accessible for people with special needs. If you're interested in finding more about eBooks check out the Adobe tutorial How to Create Adobe PDF eBooks.

If you are interested in having all the tools that graphic designers use, check out Adobe Creative Suite from TechSoup Stock for a $160 admin fee. Adobe CS includes Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat Pro, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and other applications used for page layout, image creation and manipulation, creating animation, and Web pages.

Greener Printing

Finally, if you want to find out the basics on printing your marketing documents on demand check out A Nonprofit's Guide to Green Printing or About.com’s great article Green Printing for Your Promotional Materials. Lastly, you can see Coop America's listing of green printers to find a great local printer near you from their National Green Pages.