Standards Council of Canada 2019–2020 annual report

The Standards Council of Canada (SCC) is Canada’s voice on standardization and conformity assessment on the national and international stage. Looking to bring a new voice to its annual report, it called on Ascribe for support — with our proven process and excellent results leading to a long-term writing relationship.

How Ascribe Helped

In early 2020, SCC engaged Ascribe to refresh its approach to its annual report. SCC wanted the report to place greater emphasis on narrative and storytelling while also cutting its length in half — the 2018–2019 edition was more than 120 pages! — to produce a more engaging, easy-to-read document.

As this was our first assignment for SCC, we began with a thorough review of its website, corporate plan, past annual reports, brochures and other background material to understand its strategy, key initiatives and overall tone/style. We then led a facilitated session with executive and communications team members to get their thoughts on the major themes and highlights from the fiscal year. Based on what we heard, we then developed a set of creative storytelling approaches to provide SCC with options as to how the story of the year could be framed.

After the communications team selected an approach (Reach and Impact), we crafted a questionnaire to guide our content-gathering interviews with seven members of the SCC leadership team. The interviews explored how the chosen theme resonated across the organization’s different business units and identified projects from the year that best exemplified that theme. From there, we prepared a detailed content map/outline (to get early buy-in and approval on our approach for minimal revisions later) and then wrote the report in full. We later adapted the report’s executive message into the transmittal letter provided to the Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development on behalf of the chair of SCC’s Governing Council.

Our direct client and SCC’s internal stakeholders were very pleased with the 2019–2020 annual report, which was published in October 2020. Based on the success of this engagement, we have since been invited back to help with all subsequent editions of the annual report as of 2024, as well as three iterations of SCC’s corporate plan.

Deliverable: Annual report

Our process:

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