Ontario Centres of Excellence

Annual Report

The Challenge

As an organization primarily geared to helping bring innovations to market, Ontario Centres of Excellence deals with over 600 vastly different projects every year. To build support for and understanding of its mission, OCE has to communicate to its stakeholders the story of each year’s accomplishments and goals going forward.

But a conventional annual report would not do justice to the sheer scope of OCE’s operations and the energy with which OCE people go about their mission. And no matter how well designed, such annual reports are often viewed with ambivalence. Our task: Help OCE tell its story in a unique and impactful way.

Our Solution

Our first step was clear: if OCE’s audience wouldn’t read a conventional annual report, we had to come up with something better. Fortunately, people still read magazines – especially when they’re full of interesting, personally relevant stories. So a magazine was what we created. 

“OCE: The Year In Review” captured everything that would have gone into an annual report. But instead of sterile lists and dry data, OCE’s contemporary format brought individual successes to life and communicated an ongoing, dynamic culture. Financial information was printed as a separate insert, giving OCE flexibility as they create subsequent issues of the magazine.