Technical reports can be beautiful too
A communications recipe for producing appealing reports in a process that doesn’t break the budget
Our team at NEMAC+FernLeaf works with municipalities, counties, and regional governments in the Carolinas and across the Southeast to facilitate and guide them through the climate resilience planning process. We create all of the communications materials needed for this process from scratch, because each client has individual needs and circumstances — but like good cooks, we rely on “recipes” that we’ve developed as the foundation for each new communications product. Application of the recipes results in products that our clients can easily digest, and that lead to real resilience results.
Over the years, our collection of these recipes has resulted in a virtual cookbook that we keep pulling off the shelf, thumbing through, and annotating so that we can better learn what’s worked, what hasn’t, and what still needs to be developed.
Here’s a quick dive into the “Reports” chapter of our cookbook that reveals a little about what we’ve learned.
Developing the Report Recipe
Under our contract to facilitate climate resilience planning with a city, we agreed — as do virtually all contracted groups — to produce a final report that would describe all of the the work we did along the way. Turns out, that was a bad idea.
It wasn’t a bad idea to have a report, of course. Both we and the client need a report. We need to document our approach, methodology, and practices; they need to be able to show results from spending their money — which are in these instances often public funds — and to justify and document the results of the planning process.
We were aiming for the perfect soufflé.
The bad idea was how we approached the task. At the end of the active phase of work, the project team—a team that had spent over a year designing and facilitating a series of workshops with municipal staff, creating exposure and then vulnerability and risk analyses, brainstorming and prioritizing resilience options—didn’t move on to other projects. Instead, they spent week after week drafting a report, which was then handed over to our comms team (Principal Designer Caroline Dougherty and me as Lead Science Editor) to edit, design, and produce a final report. It took five team members a very long time to produce that report. It was a very nice report. It looked great. It was eventually adopted as part of the city’s comprehensive plan. But the process wasn’t very efficient, nor was it very sustainable for our group.
Bottom line from an internal perspective: Our soufflé fell. It was as if someone opened the oven while the cake was cooking.
Bottom line from an external perspective: Awesome fallen soufflé cake!
Tweaking the Report Recipe
The next time we contracted for a resilience planning project, we adjusted our approach and agreed to provide interim reports after each phase of work. We also included a full separate phase of work to produce a fully designed final/technical report to be created in InDesign and built on the foundation of the previously prepared interim reports. The planning framework we use — the Steps to Resilience from the U.S. Climate Resilience Toolkit — allows for discrete delineation of work phases, making it easy to align the work process with the reporting process. This project, though, was a regional planning initiative involving many different jurisdictions, and was much larger in scope than the previous city-scale effort. It required a correspondingly more sophisticated report.
It started off well. Immediately after the first phase — which involved identifying climate threats, non-climate stressors, and an asset inventory — the project team spent a couple of weeks drafting the report and brought Caroline and I in to edit and work on graphics. The contract called for a review and comment period by the client, so we provided the draft interim report as a Google Doc. The client team commented and suggested edits, which we implemented as appropriate. Caroline started working to design the document in InDesign; I copy edited and passed on the text to be threaded. Phase one done.
In the meantime, our project team moved forward with the second phase of work, running exposure analyses, then vulnerability and risk assessments, and facilitating workshops. Our comms team was also heavily involved in this process, researching and writing qualitative analyses, creating combined vulnerability and risk maps, producing large posters and information packets for the workshops. But there were other projects, other deadlines, and the project team ended up considering our phase two interim report to be the vulnerability and risk analysis products we provided in the workshops. Phase three involved brainstorming resilience options, so the interim report was the resulting options spreadsheet. Phase four involved prioritizing the identified options and — you guessed it — the interim report was the prioritized list of options.
When the active phases of work were over, we were pretty much right back where we were when we got to the report phase with our previous project—except that the first part of the report had already been done. The same five team members plus two student interns again spent a very long time organizing and mapping the content, writing the report, and sending it out to the client for review as a Google Doc…and then even more time ingesting their comments and edits, pulling all the text and graphics into Indesign, and producing a final technical report. That report, which ended up being over 200 pages and included a fully designed executive summary, was an excellent report. And it was beautiful. Again, though, the process was not very efficient, nor was it very sustainable.
Bottom line from an internal perspective: This approach was better, but our soufflé fell when we pulled it out of the oven.
Bottom line from an external perspective: More awesome fallen soufflé cake!
A Better Report Recipe…for Now
Having two fallen soufflé cakes certainly isn’t bad — after all, they still taste delicious — but we were still looking for that perfect rise that would keep its structure when we took it out of the oven. So we tweaked that recipe again.
Our next resilience planning effort was again city-scale. We agreed to provide interim reports after each phase of work, but the client wasn’t interested in paying for a fully designed final report. Instead, the interim reports will be combined after the full resilience process is complete to create a report in a process that is more efficient and sustainable for the group.
This time, we’ve been sticking to it. We’ve delivered three interim reports immediately following each phase of work, each of which took four people much less time to create than the earlier reports. The reports are created as Google Docs, with some stylistic thought and a design eye going in to them, and then downloaded as PDFs for delivery. The final report will not be completed in InDesign. We anticipate that it will take four people a minimal amount of time to produce, because we’ll simply be combining the previous interim reports. That’s efficient. And sustainable.
We’re repeating this approach in another ongoing community resilience planning project, this one at the regional scale. We’ve completed the first phase of work, which involved an exposure analysis of a limited number of assets and threats focused in a couple of sectors. We delivered an excellent interim report that took three people just a few hours to produce. It’s a very nice report, and it looks great. It, too, was drafted as a Google Doc and then downloaded and delivered as a PDF. That’s very efficient and very sustainable.
Bottom line from an internal perspective: We’re on track to create a recipe for the best damn soufflé in the whole world.
Bottom line from an external perspective: Chocolate soufflé!
The report recipe we’re developing guides us as we structure our contracts and as we create reports. It will evolve and change over time, always pushing toward our ultimate goal: our clients taking real climate resilience action. Our reports, too, will keep evolving. Just last week we started talking about using e-pubs as a delivery device. Thoughts?
