Rethinking

Most reports we're asked to redesign have too many charts in them. The charts are usually accurate. There are simply so many that readers stop looking at any of them. Here's what we do instead. 1. Write the sentence before you draw the chart Decide the one thing you want the reader to take away, such as "GP referrals doubled after we opened our second site." If a picture makes that clearer, draw one. If it doesn't, the sentence will do a better job on its own, and a single la

There are now more than 3,000 B Corps in the UK, employing over 200,000 people, according to B Lab UK. If yours is one of them, the new certification standards change how you need to keep your records. What changed? B Lab launched new standards in April 2025, and three changes matter for reporting. The overall score has gone. You now have to meet requirements across seven topics, including climate, fair work and human rights, and doing well in one area no longer makes up for

Every report has somewhere its words and numbers live before they're published. For a lot of charities, that place is a design file on a freelancer's laptop, a Word document called FINAL_v7, or a website account set up by someone who left two years ago. It's worth finding out which, because it decides whether your team can change a figure without paying somebody. How it goes wrong The same stories come up again and again. A designer produced a great report, then moved on, and

If your charity's financial year started on or after 1 January 2026, your next annual report falls under new rules. They're called the Charities SORP, and the 2026 version was published last October by the Charity Commission and the other UK charity regulators. Most of what's been written about it is aimed at accountants. This is for whoever actually has to write the report. Impact is now a requirement The biggest change to the written part of your annual report is easy to de

Managing recurring reports is a quiet drain on a lot of organisations. Static documents pile up, updates get lost, and teams lose time to the same repetitive work every cycle. If you are weighing up a reporting system to fix that, it helps to know which features actually matter and which are noise. Here is an honest breakdown of what makes a reporting system worth having. What a good reporting system actually does A good reporting system does more than store data. It lets a t