Reporting on your work — making it crystal clear

If your group is like just about every other development organization, you have to tell people how and what you’re doing. You report to your donors, your partners, and your social media followers. Reporting on your work can take any number of forms, including big annual reports — which are notoriously ignored by nearly everyone — a series of mini case studies with photos, a short video, or a semiweekly tweet. Whatever the case, you want people to read what you’ve written. The burden is on you to write something that people will want to read. In just about every situation, it’s better if you write clearly. The following tips apply especially to written reports of three pages or more, but they are useful in other formats as well. Write for your audience The first principle in development writing: Write for your audience and with your purpose in mind. This principle applies in all kinds of writing, including reporting on your work. Think of whom you are writing for and what you want them to do, or how they will use the report. A foundation program officer might need a report that she can use to justify her support of your organization to her board of directors. Small individual donors might respond better to upbeat language that gives a brief overview of your work. You know your audience, or you can ask them — now write for them. By clearly defining your purpose and audience, you will be better able to write a report that will meet your goals. Format and organize it If you’re starting a report from scratch, then use the following tips to map out what you’re going to write. If you have a rough draft of your report, you can improve it through formatting and organization. Either way, the idea here is to organize your thoughts — and hence your report — so that it’s easy for your readers to follow. No matter how long your report is, try organizing it from bigger to smaller sections. First, look at your report as a whole. Whether it’s three pages or 30, your report can be broken down into sections, each with its own topic or theme. For example, you might break sections down according to program area, such as poverty, gender, or governance; geographic area, such as cities, countries, or regions where you work; or some other category. Create a subheading for each section, and put the subheading in bold, caps, or a larger font size. Each section of your report has a big topic, such as “our work to end poverty.” Then, each paragraph within that section has a topic, too — maybe one paragraph is about policy work on poverty, and another is on grassroots organizing to end poverty. Split or join paragraphs so that each has one and only one main idea or topic. Check to see that each paragraph relates logically to the next one. Try doing two rounds of revisions along these lines. The first round will be rough, but it will allow you to see your draft more clearly. Now read it again. Use the opportunity to cut redundancies and improve the logical flow of your report. Make it short By organizing your report, you’ve already taken a big step toward streamlining it. Now it’s time to cut out even more. Go back to your audience and your purpose. With a lot of reports, your purpose will be to make readers trust your organization and feel excited about your accomplishments. That typically requires only top-line information. In reports, less is more. Fight the urge to give five or six statistics where just one or two would suffice. Besides, readers will not remember all six statistics — they’ll remember only one or two, and not necessarily the ones you want them to remember. This principle also applies to qualitative information. If you’re like a lot of writers, your first full draft of a report is long. Try cutting the draft in half. If you find redundant sentences, strike them. If there are unnecessary words, strike them. If you have adjectives and adverbs aplenty, strike them. Now polish the writing to make sure it flows well. With practice, you’ll develop a stronger sense of what and how much your audience needs to know. Keep it concrete After you’ve organized your report and cut it down to size, you can start to massage some of the language. The better that readers understand an organization’s work, the more likely they are to support it. One way to make your work more easily graspable is to talk about people and concrete things. In our eagerness to make things sound big and important, we may sometimes neglect to talk about the people who are at the center of our work. Always remember your people when writing; you might simply reference “us,” “community,” or “families,” or you might highlight populations or individuals who benefit from your work. Concreteness also requires that you avoid technical language as much as possible. Jargon develops in any field because it’s a shorthand way of describing things, but it is often vague and off-putting and should be avoided in public reports. For example, instead of saying “capacity building,” say what you mean, whether it’s “workshops on new farming techniques” or “equipment to build new wells.” Similarly, “infrastructure” is a useful word, but “roads and bridges” is more immediately attractive to readers. The value of clarity When you write clearly about what you do and who you work with, you are providing a valuable service for your organization. Some organizations use a lot of technical language to cover up the fact that they haven’t achieved much at all. If your writing exposes holes in your organization’s work, then at least that gives it a chance to fill those holes. If your clear writing highlights the fine work your group has done, then you’ll help rally support for it. Either way, your pursuit of clarity will make your organization better.