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You are reading this correctly, Investor Relations at NORMA Group is breaking new ground in reporting. In addition to the usual interactive PDF, the Annual Report 2021 and Half-Year Report 2022 are now also available in a fully digitalized form.
Annual Report 2021: Reflecting our digitalization
Under the conceptual theme “Sustainable. Relevant.”, we take a virtual look back on 12 stormy months and a year with mixed impulses. We have made considerable progress in the area of digitization and smart innovations in 2021 in an increasingly rapidly digitizing world, and demonstrated that we are constantly innovating as a company. Therefore, it was only logical that our lead agency RYZE Digital realized our Annual Report 2021 exclusively digitally and as an interactive ‘scrollytelling’. From videos to interactive charts to further links, readers can expect a variety of digital bonus content. The basis for this is RYZE Digital’s ‘Digital Report’ tool.
‘Digital Report’: The multimedia Annual Report at the push of a button
The principle behind ‘Digital Report’ is as simple as it is smart: NORMA Group’s project team consolidates and creates the content for the report in a disclosure management system. This is a system that is specifically designed for report creation. The reports are usually created on the basis of MS Excel and MS Word. Then the status of the report is exported as a Word file. For the PDF of the report, the Word file was linked with InDesign and finally compiled with other design parts of the report to form the overall PDF of the Annual Report.
In parallel, the same Word file is automatically transformed into the full HTML report via the Word Connector of the ‘Digital Report’. The highlight here is that both the PDF report and the full HTML report are generated from a single Word data source. The advantage of this solution is its flexibility. Which content do we want to offer online – and which not? Since we know our target groups very well, we knew from the outset, which content would be considered for the 2021 Online Annual Report. Using ‘Digital Report’, we were able to target this.
Scrollytelling: multimedia experience of the Annual Report 2021
A key element of NORMA Group’s Online Annual Report 2021 is scrollytelling. Here, photos and videos, animated graphics and reading samples merge with each touch of the touchpad and each turn of the scroll wheel. Readers experience and hear the content, all on their own, yet all at once. That’s scrollytelling, and that’s exactly what our 2021 Online Annual Report is: multimedia. It takes readers on a completely new, virtual look back at NORMA Group’s past fiscal year. With every touch of the touchpad, they move forward or backward through the multimedia story of our Annual Report, depending on their own speed. After all, there’s plenty to discover along the way, including the CEO video and interactive charts and tables of key figures as Excel downloads.
Online Annual Report 2021: Milestone and icebreaker for further online reports
The new digital format of the Annual Report thus provides our Investor Relations target groups with even faster access to relevant information about NORMA Group. For us, the Online Annual Report 2021 is therefore much more than just a launch. It was a strategic milestone within the expansion stages of our online reports. In August 2022, for example, the Half-Year Report 2022 was also published in the digital format and with the established new functionalities. Since large parts of the Annual Report 2021, especially page templates and interactive elements, could simply be reused, this resulted in major synergy effects. The introduction of the online report format through the use of ‘Digital Report’ is therefore not least also a sustainable investment that pays off directly.
These milestones underline: Investor Relations at NORMA Group is always thinking “new”. We continuously develop financial reporting in a modern and meaningful way from report to report.
