Chosen because the International School of Brussels won Gold for Annual Report/Report of Gifts/ Donor Report in the 2021 Brilliance Awards. Lucia Yuki, Senior Admissions and Community Coordinator, ISB, tells the story of this award winner.

Deliver More Than Financials.
Tell The School Story.

At ISB, we recognize that an Annual Report can be much more than just a document filled with the numbers and statistics of a year gone by. We believe that it can become a memento for the school and its entire community, that it has the power of telling the story of the school and all the amazing people who populated its narrative.

Being able to acknowledge and celebrate each year’s challenges and successes is one of the most wonderful things about working on ISB’s Annual Report: regardless of how the year goes, there is always a sense of hope towards the future. 

Celebrate a Milestone

This year, the Report marked a particularly special milestone: 70 years of ISB. This was an opportunity for us to celebrate the school and add an element of surprise that would make the Report stand out in the same way that ISB has done in all these years.

We chose three, symbolic features of our campus (the tennis bubble, the ‘red octopus’, and the ‘Chateau’) — each introduced to the school at different periods over its 70 years — and created stylised images of these three ‘symbols’.

We hoped that the images would speak to our visitors and evoke memories of a moment or experience at ISB.  We also used them to represent the three overarching sections of our report: the school’s Past, Present and Future. With this report, we wanted to celebrate our legacy, embrace our present, and look back on a year in which new priorities emerged and new, valuable lessons were learned.

Develop Content, Design and Structure

There was a lot of content that could have gone into this report, and so we had to be wise about how we would structure, format and present the project this year. We knew that there was nothing more powerful than the art of storytelling, and that the best way to celebrate 70 years of ISB was through the voices of our community and our alumni: their memories, experiences, and life-long connections to ISB.

For this purpose, we decided to create three distinct, but interconnected sections: Past, Present, and Future. The ‘Past’ section would focus on the history and legacy of ISB, while the ‘Present’ would create space for our Leadership Team, Family Association, Financial Reports and Donor Roll. Our ‘Future’ section was dedicated to some of those school-wide priorities we’ve been developing and will continue to focus on in the coming years.

We were lucky enough to work in a team of three talented Advancement professionals that each brought their own ‘superpower’ to the work, enabling the content piece, design, and structure of the report to speak to one another and come together as flawlessly as possible. This was the real strategy behind the work: creating a ‘flat’ structure to the report that would allow for these three elements to naturally develop from one another.

Reimagine What An Annual Report Looks Like

A couple of years ago, we switched from print to digital and began using Foleon as our content creation platform. Foleon allows us to create a clean, interactive and purposeful report that makes use of a great deal of content already created by our team for ISB.  Together with our fantastic designer, Dave Low, and senior content coordinator, Michaela Vanhamel, we re-imagined what an Annual Report could be when presented in a creative and interactive design.

Our ‘Year in Review’ sub-section really draws upon the highlights of the year by allowing visitors to ‘re-live’ some of those moments through videos and photos of the school previously shared on our social media. This year, much of our focus was on the Alumni section of the report, and it was wonderful to be able to bring the school’s legacy to life through our virtual alumni reunion videos and other significant pieces of content. We worked on the report over a period of five months.

And The Crowd Goes Wild

Within the first week of publishing, the report received lots of positive feedback from the ISB community, in particular from existing ISB families (below a few examples).

“I just wanted to say congratulations on the amazing Annual Report. I just read it on the train and I am looking again now. It is so well done!”

“This Annual Report just stunned me. It’s so bright and celebratory. I loved it.”

“The best Annual Report we’ve had so far!”

Congratulations, International School of Brussels! You are brilliant.

TEAM
David Willows
Lucia Yuki
Dave Low
Michaela Vanhamel

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