Eye-tracking research, mobile habits, and the most common mistake nonprofits make — and what to do instead.
Most nonprofits write their annual report the same way they'd write a compliance document — because, unconsciously, that's often exactly how it feels. But here's the thing worth remembering: your annual report isn't required by the IRS. Your Form 990 is. Your annual report is entirely voluntary, which means every choice inside it should serve one goal — communication, not paperwork.
So what actually works?
Photos of people beat photos of things — and both beat paragraphs of text
Eye-tracking research on charitable communications consistently shows the same pattern: readers' attention gravitates toward images of people before anything else on a page, and lingers longest on images showing people together, not solo shots. Text, by comparison, gets skimmed, not read — especially dense blocks of it.
This isn't a reason to cut your impact stories. It's a reason to show them, not just describe them. A photo of a program in action, with a short caption, will hold more attention than a full paragraph explaining the same thing.
"Your annual report is entirely voluntary — which means every choice inside it should serve one goal: communication, not paperwork."
The most common mistake: burying impact under data
Nonprofit communications research points to the same handful of recurring mistakes, over and over: reports that read like an internal performance review — every program, every committee meeting, every activity — with no sense of what a donor actually wants to know.
If a reader has to dig for the one number that matters, most won't dig.
The fix isn't removing the data. It's leading with the two or three numbers that actually tell the story, and letting the rest support it instead of burying it.
Mobile matters more than most nonprofits plan for
A huge share of your audience will open your report on a phone, not a desktop — often from a text or social post, not an email sitting open on a laptop. A report that isn't built mobile-first is quietly losing readers before they ever reach your impact numbers.
This isn't a minor formatting issue. It's the difference between a donor who feels informed and connected, and one who bounced after three seconds because the text was too small to read without pinching.
What this means for how you build your next report
The research points in a consistent direction. A few principles that hold up across nearly every study:
Lead with a photo and a number, not a paragraph. The first thing a reader sees sets the tone for everything that follows. Make it visual and make it count.
Choose two or three photos of people together over a dozen individual headshots. Group photos signal community. They make donors feel like they're part of something, not just funding a service.
Say the most important thing first. Don't make donors dig for it. If your organization served 4,200 families this year, that's the headline — not the third paragraph of your executive director's letter.
Build for the phone screen it'll actually be read on. Test your report on a phone before you send it. If you have to pinch to read it, so does your donor.
"If a reader has to dig for the one number that matters, most won't dig."
This is what we built Charity Captain around
Not because we guessed at what works — but because it reflects how people actually read. Every Lookbook leads with a strong photo and your key numbers before a single paragraph of text. It's designed to be read on a phone, shared in a text, and finished in under three minutes.
The format does the work so your story can land the way it deserves to.
Build your Lookbook
See the format in action. Create your first Lookbook free — no design skills needed.
