National Research Council 2021–2022 annual report

Teams of researchers, engineers, technical advisors and other dedicated professionals make groundbreaking science possible at the National Research Council of Canada (NRC). In 2022, Ascribe developed a bold new approach for the NRC’s annual report, celebrating the people who power the research and highlighting how their work is helping address issues facing Canada and the world.

How Ascribe Helped

Our team has worked on the NRC’s annual report every year since 2018. For the 2021–22 edition, the NRC wanted to focus on its own people and the contributions they make to Canadian research and innovation, especially coming out of the pandemic. That would mark a significant shift in the storytelling approach for the report: previously, the year’s achievements had always been attributed to the organization as whole, with specific individuals named only rarely. So what would this new approach look like in practice?

We started with a facilitated discussion involving the President & CEO as well as key members of the NRC executive team. Based on what we heard during that session, we proposed several people-focused creative approaches (i.e., ways of packaging the strategic story of the year). The NRC chose the option in which the report would centre on a collection of employee-driven vignettes, each profiling a member of the NRC team by describing how they contributed to a top achievement from the year and what they hoped the impacts would be.

The vignettes covered a range of people and teams — young professionals, mid-career researchers, senior program directors, men and women, and people from various cultural backgrounds — and were written in a variety of formats, including editorial-style articles and Q&As. To get the information we needed to flesh out the report, we conducted interviews with senior NRC leaders and also distributed email-based questionnaires to the 17 people being profiled in the vignettes, with their written responses directly informing our copy.

The annual report was published by the NRC in August 2022 and was well received by our client, including very positive feedback from the President & CEO and others within the NRC. Due to the success of this new approach, employees have continued to be prominently featured in each annual report since this one.

Deliverable: Annual report

Our process:

• Facilitated session with senior leadership
• Creative concept development and storytelling approaches
• Questionnaire development
• Content-gathering interviews with executives
• Detailed content outline
• Writing and revisions