Part One: Leveraging your investment in the print version

Since some reasons make more sense for some companies, these rationales for proper conversion of print annuals to HTML web content are in no particular order.So you just sent out 15,000 print copies of your beautiful new annual report. Hope everyone reads it and also keeps it as a handy reference throughout the coming year!But what if they don’t – is it all a big waste of money and trees?

Maybe not. Some of that sunk cost can be re-purposed. After all, re-cycling is very “in” these days.Let’s look at the total cost of adding that nice sample to your printer’s coffee table.Consider all the costs exclusively associated with the print piece:

• costs of printing and binding (31%)
• cost of postage and mailing service (16%),
• and cost of pre-press production/film (6%).

this leaves you with third party development costs not necessarily exclusive to the print piece:

• photographic services, stock photo purchases, illustration services (5%)
• external writing and editing services (7%)
• typesetting (6%),
• design services (17%)
• translation (3%)
• author’s alterations (3%)
• other (7%)*

which leaves you what we might call internal development costs:

• internal meetings
• compiling and editing internal materials
• meetings with outside suppliers
• handling photographers
• photography choice
• internal project management.

When your beautiful annual is put out for recycling, perhaps unopened, with a number of other proxy voting envelopes, mutual fund reports and other annual reports, is that the end of the story?I think it shouldn’t be. The internal and external development costs should not end their life in the blue bin; they should be leveraged with a bit more investment into an on-going web site resource. (The PDF of the print annual is, of course, available online but it is a mistake to consider this as website content. If a PDF were as good as HTML then the whole Internet would be PDFs).The point is, the thoughtful and well-executed materials contained in the report are often underutilized. Adding a bit more to the budget for the HTML conversion will double the audience for the materials. The HTML version of your print annual is a way to leverage all the blood sweat and tears (as well as 2/3 of the budget) that went into the print version.Some reports say, 90% of printed annual report pages go unread. Do not be a stat. Go online.*2005 Annual Report Survey “A study of trends and practices in the annual report process, CIRI.”