Previously, Maryland Sea Grant’s annual report was produced as a print piece and mailed out to a list as a package along with a letter and other pieces. The last one to go out in this format was the 2018 report, at the close of 2019. Then came the pandemic.
It was time to rethink the report—early in pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about its spread and distrust in mail. Additionally, with the office all working remotely, the mailing “packing” parties to prep the envelopes weren’t an option, and print costs were skyrocketing due to supply chain issues. So we regrouped and reevaluated.
One limitation of the printed piece was that it provided little space for text and imagery and we wanted to better highlight the work the program was doing. We had originally shifted some of our magazine stories to the ArcGIS StoryMap format in order to test more engaging ways to present them, and those efforts had been successful —we’d received great feedback on them and the story analytics showed that readers were staying on the pages for longer. So we turned to that platform.
We also decided to shift to a biennial format, in order to be able to delve a bit deeper into some of the content. I’m really proud of the result: our 2019-20 biennial report.