DELTA Annual Reports

The DELTA Annual Report aims to update interested staff, faculty and partners about DELTA’s progress made toward strategic goals during the year. It features highlights, staff accolades and budget information as well as a letter from the Vice Provost of DELTA.

Challenges

Previously, each year the DELTA Annual Report was developed from scratch in a new online format with a downloadable PDF.

The communications staff was writing up to eight stories to capture what had happened the previous year. This habit created a lot of extra work on the writers. We sought a solution to the communications workload as well.

It was a challenge for our graphic and web designers to continually make edits during the proofing stage, and the communications specialist was unable to make the edits. This created a lot of back and forth to proof, edit and reproof.

To make the report on brand, accessible and strategically aligned with our stated goals, we partnered with the AppsDev team to create a new instance for our stand-alone Annual Report on WordPress.

Solutions

Web developer Katie Richardson created the on-brand WordPress theme (stand-alone instance) in 2016 to solve the issues of having different formats each year and discontinue using a PDF version, which isn’t accessible.

In 2017, the communications team focused on writing stories throughout the year to represent a lot of the ongoing work instead of a handful of stories at the end of the year. This focused effort worked well when paired with the highlights of the year. Stories representing each DELTA goal are linked in a sidebar as evidence of work from the fiscal year.

During the 2019-2020 year, we worked through the pandemic at a distance, so we were unable to take new photos to illustrate DELTA’s work over the year after March.

Since all of our meetings were mostly in Zoom, our photographer Katie Harris was able to replicate a Zoom meeting for our front cover image, which we generally shoot in the spring.

There was no travel during the year after March 2020, so we opted to remove the interactive Google Map, which indicated where our staff traveled to present at conferences, from the staff accolades page. Some still presented virtually, so we included the listing per usual.

We have received positive feedback from the approach and inquiries from others about replicating the code for their annual reports.

For more information about DELTA services, please contact LearnTech.