reports

November 11 2011

Annual reports with more appeal

seriogaTelethon, Works reports, Telethon

Annual reports are an almost mandatory communication item for most research organisations. A good report must showcase scientific achievements with a clear, concise style and convey an organisation’s values and goals to a non-technical audience.

In 2006, the Telethon foundation asked me to review and edit their existing annual report in order to improve its readability and overall impact.

For fund-raising charities like Telethon, the annual report is particularly important: It helps stakeholders and potential donors evaluate the organisation’s accountability, transparency and efficiency.

The original document focused on hard facts about the foundation and on financial figures. I suggested a radical content redesign. We eliminated several redundant or unnecessary sections of the document, and the first part of the report was shifted towards stories that exemplified the goals and achievements of the foundation.

Transparency and hard data were still essential in the report, but they were now presented within the context of a story. We placed stodgy financial figures in an annex outside the main body of the document and organised them more rationally. We hired a graphic studio for the cover and the layout.

The resulting report was shorter (which, incidentally, saved the foundation a few thousand euros in printing costs), easier to read and more informative for the average stakeholder. After that redesign, I edited five editions of the report, which received very positive feedback from readers and stakeholders.

November 10 2011

Publishable reports for EU projects

seriogaEU Project ESTOOLS, EU Project IPODD, Works ESTOOLS, Ipodd, reports

The EU guidelines state that:

The Publishable final activity report for EU consortia is submitted at the same time as the last Periodic activity report. In its final form it cumulates and summarises the activities and results over the full duration of the project. It is of suitable quality to enable direct publication by the Commission. While not excluding technical language, it should be broadly comprehensible to an interested general reader.

As the name suggests, publishable reports are …well, published online by the EU commission. Amongst the many mandatory documents of an EU project, the final publishable activity report stands out as a communication product addressed to the layperson.

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In practice, the final publishable activity report is the only document that will certainly survive in the public space after the end of the project. Try Googling any expired EU project and you will probably stumble upon its final publishable report as the most prominent page available for public information. A concise, well-written report is therefore the best way to highlight the result of a project and account for the EU taxpayers’ money.

As part of my communication activity, I produce final reports for EU projects. With my help and a minor investment, EU project managers can outsource the reporting workload and obtain an engaging and effective summary of the entire scientific work and results.

As a bonus, I can enrich documents with state-of-the-art graphics that highlight the collaborative effort of a consortium and its bibliometric output.

November 10 2011

How do you visualize scientific collaborations?

seriogaBibliometrics, Works bibliometrics, co-authorship, co-publishing, collaboration, copublishing, ESTOOLS, EU projects, FP7, reports

Multi-centre projects—such as EU framework consortia—are expected to create strong interactions between different groups. How can we evaluate and visualise the collaborative effort in a clear, understandable way?

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a graphic can illustrate scientific interactions with amazing clarity. See, for example, the picture below, which I made for the Publishable Final Report of an EU consortium.

The graph is based on a sophisticated analysis of 116 peer-reviewed publications originated from the consortium. Principal investigators (PIs) from the consortium are represented as red balls, whereas all other co-authors are represented as blue balls. Authors who published at least one paper together are connected by a line. In this way, it’s easy to visualise the interconnection between groups that have worked together. In our figure, a significant number of PIs have co-authored one or more papers (red lines) and are part of a significant co-publishing network, which indicates a high level of collaboration.

Even without looking at the underlying data, non-technical readers can get the correct idea that the consortium established fruitful scientific collaborations.

I am proficient with advanced bibliometric tools for measuring and visualising scientific publications and collaborations. Using these powerful analyses, I provide my clients with useful tools for strategic planning and evaluation and with self-explaining data for their reports.