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AP has always published annual reports, but only the last five have been online. Focusing on editorial, business and financial highlights of the year, it became clear that the online reports were invaluable sales tools, prompting me to refocus the audience. After leading a series of workshops with senior management, it seemed the 2016 report would take on a new form: one that merged the editorial and business highlights into one.
The 2016 report was going to be different. Reacting to feedback from sales and news teams of the utility of the digital annual reports, I developed a workshop to gather requirements in order to better serve the internal needs, in contrast to the more generic consumer audience we had targeted in the past. With each department, accompanied by its management committee member, I led stakeholders through a series of exercises designed to identify major accomplishments and highlights from 2016, strategic goals for 2017 and how the annual could help them to achieve those goals, which ranged from new customer contracts to new technological innovations. I aimed to serve as many needs as possible.
From a mountain of good content, it was important to organize, prioritize and strategize. In uncharted territories, I, with support from my team, was responsible for creating and selling the concept and subsequently delivering on it. The concept that emerged contextualized the year's highlights in AP's most valuable assets: our news stories. The year's top enterprise news stories would serve as the main content for the report layered with relevant highlights within the text, not only allowing us to include more news stories than ever, but providing context for the impact of our most exciting and important business and technology highlights.
With the concept solidified and sold, I moved on to the design phase, defining a structure for the new report and developing a system for designing many different types of content. It was important to think strategically for the sake of my time designing, but even more for the sake of the developer's time; the 2016 report was considerably bigger, but the time in which to do it was not. I developed a timeline encompassing the overlapping streams of content development, design and technical development, and communicated the plans with the different parties involved, including stakeholders companywide.
