The internet is a chaotic jungle. Your impact report? It’s a small, quiet thing trying to make itself heard above the roar.
Imagine your audience is a little monkey, darting through a digital jungle of distractions. Every second, her attention jerks from food, to danger, to the next shiny thing. She’s not sipping tea, savoring your carefully crafted prose. She’s racing, skimming, scanning—if she even clicks at all.
Now let’s step back to the relatively controlled environment of you, sitting in front of your computer, contemplating this year’s impact report. When my clients finally get the chance to reflect on this important task, they do it with a lot of intention. After spending the year collecting data and stories, they sit down to write. They think carefully about the flow. They create a narrative arc. They craft an outline and then weave it all together. It’s a beautiful thing.
But the way it’s written is not the way it’s read.
Back in the jungle, here’s the monkey. When she clicks on that link in an email newsletter, she’s not settling in with a cup of tea to savor it cover to cover. She’s a wild animal racing around haphazardly. She sniffs this section for a second, runs over there, circles back. She’s madly scanning, scrolling, jumping around, looking for something interesting to land on. Her eyeballs are moving a mile a minute.
And that’s if she even clicked in the first place.
The reality is that your impact report is competing with every single other piece of information out there. Your most thoughtfully written case for support is up against a vacation photo, a viral video, a text about dinner, and a doom-scroll through political headlines.
Your real competition isn’t the other organization doing what you’re doing. It’s the entire internet.
If you haven’t heard it, go listen to “Welcome to the Internet” by Bo Burnham. It nails this feeling. “Could I interest you in everything? All of the time?” (When I listened to this while writing this article, it made me both laugh and cry before the song ended. We live in such an amazing and difficult time.)
Ok, it’s Tuesday morning. You gather what remains of your attention and focus and pour it into this most important piece of comms. You write something thoughtful and cohesive.
But here’s the question: how many people start at the beginning and scroll through to the end, let alone read it in that order?
I would venture to say 0%. If your audience is anything like me, they’re zooming through the document or webpage first to get a sense of how long it is—and whether it’s worth their time. Assuming you’ve captured their attention in the first place.
If something sparks curiosity, they might slow down. Skim more deliberately. Look for a headline that draws them in. Maybe they’ll read a story or two.
In this context, each page, or section of a website, has to stand on its own.
Take the Tony’s Chocolonely excellent impact report. Each page makes one (maybe two) clear points. Their data is paired with visuals. There’s a lot of simplicity. And that simplicity requires real discipline—it means cutting a lot of things that feel important. It means using bold visuals. It means stating big, important things clearly and succinctly.
This is the hook. Not the whole story.
You are not writing a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. No one is going to stick around because their friend told them “it gets good after the first chapter.” You have to get out of your own head. You have to be clear-eyed about the people coming into contact with your comms—and their reality.
I also want to make a point here about space. I’m not advocating for more of the insane speed of memes and video reels. Your readers actually do care, despite the world that’s trying to steal their attention. Offering them respite, a place to rest their weary eyeballs and consider what you are saying is a gift.
They are humans. And this world is asking a lot of them right now.
Reporting tends to be dry and factual. But for most of the orgs I work with, the impact report is their big chance each year to make the case for why someone should invest their precious time, energy and money in them.
So please appeal to people’s hearts! Remind them why they care in the first place. You’re not writing for a boardroom full of men smoking cigars, making decisions based on astounding impact numbers. You’re writing for people who’ve opened the news recently and feel like the world is burning.
This looks like:
So, as you gather content for your next impact report, try to get out of your own way. Remember what you’re up against. Step out of your shoes. Test it on your kids, your parents, your mechanic. That little jungle monkey just might stop and stay awhile.