Your report won't read itself - here's what helps

Sometime last year the UN published a report about how people don’t read UN reports, which is either deeply ironic or exactly the kind of honest reckoning we needed. Maybe both.

The numbers are a little brutal. The top 5% of reports get downloaded over 5,500 times. One in five gets fewer than 1,000. And downloading, as the Secretary-General gently pointed out, doesn't necessarily mean reading.

I think about this a lot when I'm working on a report. Not in a doom-spiral way, but in a genuinely useful, roll-up-your-sleeves kind of way. Because the problem isn't the research. The research is good. The problem is the information design.

So here's what I keep coming back to when I'm in the thick of a project.

Lead with what's at stake for a human being, not a dataset

There's a version of every finding that leads with a number, and a version that leads with a person. "735 million people fled their home last night, that's more than the entire population of Europe" lands differently than the same statistic wrapped in baseline measurements and percentage increases. Both are true. One of them gets attention because it is relatable.

Treat the executive summary like it might be the only thing anyone sees

Because it might be! So let’s make it count. If someone reads nothing else, do they leave knowing what happened, why the report matters, and what to do next about it? If not, that's the thing to fix first.

Design for the person who has minutes, not hours

Subheadings every few paragraphs and one idea per paragraph is gold. If someone can scan the whole thing in half a minute and come away with the shape of it, you've done something right. Academic writing loves to pack complexity into long sentences. Communication that reaches citizens tends to do the opposite.

Know who you're really writing for

And I mean really, who do we make it for? Not our colleagues, not the committee that approved the budget, not the people who already agree with us. Perhaps a journalist who needs a quotable line? A city-worker who needs to explain it to a mayor? The person who will only ever encounter a screenshot of one paragraph. "Unprecedented concerning trends" won't travel. "Worst drought in 40 years" most likely will.

I know there's a version of this conversation where someone says "but our stakeholders expect rigour." And yes, absolutely. Rigour and readability are not opposites. You can be precise and clear at the same time-it just takes more work, not less. A report that doesn't get read is research that doesn't get used. That feels worth taking seriously.