Do you work in corporate communication? Have you considered using interactive sustainability reports to stimulate stakeholder engagement yet? Or are you still stuck on traditional PDF reports?
If your company produces sustainability reports, impact reports, or annual reports, I recommend checking out the interactive options available nowadays.
I’ve been a bit reluctant to use AI tools in the past. Still, RELAYTO is a tool that I’ve recently come across. It has exceptional functionality and huge benefits for corporate communication, specifically for corporate reports. I’m now convinced!
Check out my conversation with Pete Vrettakos, co-founder of RELAYTO, an awesome tool for creating interactive sustainability reports.
Transcript of my conversation with Pete:
The Potential of Interactive Sustainability Reports with RELAYTO
Elizabeth
I recently spoke to a gentleman named Pete Vrettakos, co-founder of a tool called RELAYTO. And RELAYTO is an amazing tool that’s really got me quite hooked as someone who loves corporate communications and is engaged in corporate communications projects on a daily basis. This tool really has transformed the way I think about corporate reporting. For example, it is an amazing tool if you have various sustainability reports or annual reports and you really want to display the content, data, and statistics in a way that has never been done before and in a way that appeals more to various stakeholder groups. This way of displaying data and content for reporting purposes is something that’s becoming more and more popular, and you’ll see it being done more often. That’s not to say the traditional PDF is necessary when it comes to reporting. Still, it’s just a new way of visualising information and data and also making it a lot more accessible to different stakeholders. Here’s the chat that I had with Pete about RELAYTO. I really hope that you enjoy it, and I really hope it gets you thinking about their possibilities for corporate reporting that can really extend beyond what we traditionally know as a basic PDF or basic interactive PDF. And it got me really excited. So, here’s the chat that I had with Pete recently. Enjoy.
Content Presentation and Accessibility on the RELAYTO Platform
Pete
This is an example of a company dashboard. They see all their content that they need. Each of these boxes represents a digital experience that has been created by uploading a PDF. So, there are a lot of PDFs that have been uploaded onto the RELAYTO platform, which, by the way, is hosted, but in AWS in Dublin, it’s so it’s uploaded to the RELAYTO platform. From this dashboard perspective, as you’re logged in as a seatholder of RELAYTO, you have an all-content section in your dashboard. You have a hubs section in your dashboard and that represents what you see here. Each of these boxes represents different content that has been created on RELAYTO. They are simply single URLs that include any tagged digital experiences you have created by uploading a PDF. Specifically, for ESG sustainability reports, CSR, or integrated reports, I like to see when folks build narrative-themed content hubs where they then populate those hubs with digital experiences that include those Annual Report PDFs they have already built. For example, the hub is called Sustainability and Stewardship 2022. Let’s click on that and view it. This is the view of this digital experience that used to be a 137-page PDF uploaded to RELAYTO to create this digital experience. Let me show you the actual PDF that was used to create the digital experience. What you’re used to seeing as a report creator is the PDF version.
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Embracing Innovation in Corporate Reporting
Elizabeth
But I mean, these kinds of PDFs are very… Yeah, it’s a very traditional way of corporate reporting, right? I mean, so what RELAYTO offers is something totally, totally different and unique. And I think this is very, very interesting. And I think there is a shift, basically. I mean, I really believe that there’s a shift, and people are moving away from the sort of, yeah, basic static PDF towards something different, you know, and something that’s also more accessible because, I mean, yeah, we want to really try to reach all types of people. So, for example, you know, people who might have visual impairments, and I can imagine there are huge possibilities with RELAYTO in terms of accessibility as well.
Enhancing User Experience with Nested Navigation in Digital Reports
Pete
The first thing I want to draw your attention to is the idea of having the Table of Contents nested and in a persistent navigation bar that comes with these digital experiences. The idea is that during your design of the PDF, for example, if you’re designing the copy or you’re designing into your PDF, this detailed content page table of contents showing the Table of Contents, that you also have an accompanying bookmark for each or as much detail as you want to go as part of the designed PDF. So that when you upload the final version of your PDF, you want it to be published as a digital experience. The process of creating this nice nested navigation bar is as seamless as it’s part of the upload process. So, it’ll take time for you to upload the PDF when the digital experience is created. It’ll take 15 to 20 seconds. And if the bookmarks are part of that PDF design, they will automatically show up as nice and nested and beneficial. See how easy it is to find what you’re looking for.
Elizabeth
You know, we have the standard PDF, which is still very much necessary. I can imagine for corporate communications purposes, corporate communications managers and directors need that. But this is really a heightened experience of taking those reports and making something very special out of them basically.
Pete
It is easier to digest, easier to distribute, and more screen-friendly. More interactive.
Inspiring Stakeholder Engagement
Elizabeth
Yeah, I can imagine that. You know, if you create a PDF from a corporate standpoint, you have different stakeholders, and of course, this needs to be able to appeal to all different types of audiences or stakeholders. So, how would you say that RELAYTO could be designed in a way that appeals to those different target audiences? Would that be through interactive elements, for example, because, of course, certain target audiences respond to certain sections of a report? For example, Investors Really Want to learn about the governance of an ESG report. So yeah, and maybe, you know, potential employees might want to learn more about the social side or the environmental side. So, how could you adapt elements like a RELAYTO to appeal to those different stakeholders, if that makes sense?
Pete
You know, as the report stakeholder owner, one of them that the investor will be more interested in corporate sustaining the section for now if you have the luxury of knowing who it is that you’re sending this to, who the request is coming from, that it’s an investor rather than an NGO or an employee then RELAYTO provides the ability to share a specific URL that drops at any page that you want them to be directed to, and the copy that I just made from the digital experience becomes an animated thumbnail. We have an animated thumbnail for the first page of the report. So if I share the first page, this is animated, but the person that you send the email to the investor who is asking you for information they’ll receive in their email inbox, they’ll see this and click on that. They’ll click on the thumbnail, and they’ll be taken directly to the specific page that you know is appropriate for them to see.
AI Capabilities for Enhanced Data Analysis
Elizabeth
So another really cool feature of RELAYTO that Pete told me about is the is the unique AI (Artificial Intelligence) chat within the tool, which allows users to basically compare the contents of different uploaded documents in different PDFs. So, for example, if you are an investor and you’re very interested in carbon emissions and how this has changed year on year, you can basically compare statistics found in documents using the AI chat. You could ask it to examine the carbon emissions from a certain year and then compare that with the current year. You could also find certain information and data using the AI chat. The contents of what pops up in the chat are focused on your entire hub within RELAYTO. So it can search within any of your content. And this makes it a very, very special and unique tool. That is excellent for all kinds of stakeholders.
Pete
It can search the digital experience answers within the digital experience, or it can search more broadly in the entire hub that you’ve built around that digital experience.
Enhancing Engagement in Interactive Sustainability Reports Using YouTube Videos
Elizabeth
So I think for me. Still, the best tool within RELAYTO is its ability to take any YouTube URL and plug that YouTube video into the content that you’re looking at. So, when you’re creating interactive space, let’s say you’ve uploaded your sustainability report or your impact report, you really take your own video about the company, for example. You can really embed that YouTube video in the content that you’re looking for, which means that the user doesn’t have to be redirected to another platform, such as YouTube, to view the content there and then toggle back to the actual report. They can really watch everything and see this video from within the interactive environment. So you could have any kind of videos that your company has, for example, or put about a section of your report or about the company. You can include a video there where you have relevant information. For example, you might have been firing a sustainability story about a sustainability project a company has been working on. You can take that YouTube video and embed it in the respective section.
Elizabeth
So it’s just a URL that you’re taking from YouTube and then plugging in, basically, into the latest PDF report that’s now interactive.
Pete
Yeah, that’s one of the options. There are instances where you add additional reports that way. So instead of the video being that, you can have an additional report being an embed.
Elizabeth
Oh, wow. Okay. So it’s like a report within a report.
Pete
It allows deep diving into topics that matter to some people but might not matter to all, so it’s a way of having a multi-layered digital experience. Multi-layered in the sense that you can start with the core of a document and embed supporting documents within it by superimposing. So this is the slide that I want to focus on to show you probably the coolest thing that comes out of the analytics that is applied as soon as you upload a PDF to content in the PDF. This is the use case slide for RELAYTO that shows all the different ways people can use it. So it’s across marketing, sales, customer experience, and communications, including investor relations and PR. Every time someone visits this page URL, they hover over a circle, then click on the circle, and let’s say they go to the hub; here’s that immersive pop-up I was telling you about earlier. They can click on that and view the immersive pop-up. Every time someone goes through those steps, it’s measured and tracked in the interactions section of RELAYTO for every PDF you upload or any document that’s in your own hub or on your dashboard.
The Future of Corporate Communications with Interactive Sustainability Reports
Elizabeth
It’s very impressive. I’m entirely convinced about the power of RELAYTO; I think it’s exceptionally useful. This interactive tool doesn’t require any real design skills. You can simply upload a PDF within seconds and create your own hub with various documents, including corporate communication reports. Viewing the analytics is exceptionally valuable. Tailoring your interactive platform to different stakeholders is super helpful. So yeah, I think it’s a very useful tool for corporate communications, and definitely, in my field, I see a lot of potential for people to use this. Thanks for watching till the end! If you found RELAYTO interesting and potentially useful for your role in corporate communications or for any kind of corporate reports, please check out the comment section below this video. There, you can find more information about the possibilities of using RELAYTO and even have a trial run by uploading your own reports and experiencing the interactivity it offers. So, give it a try with an old ESG or impact report, or even an annual report from the past, and see all the different possibilities. I hope this video demonstrates that there are some wonderful tools out there, and we just need to embrace them. I’ve been quite traditional in my approach to corporate communications, creating very traditional documents. But it’s amazing that we can now embrace artificial intelligence tools like RELAYTO as incredible opportunities to get our information to relevant stakeholders. A tool like RELAYTO truly shows us the interactivity and the possibilities to engage our stakeholders even further because, ultimately, that’s the goal of corporate communications. So, I hope you enjoyed this video. Feel free to check out the comments section for all the details about RELAYTO and how you can have your own trial run by uploading your documents. I’m very curious to hear what you think, and if you have any other cool tools to share, please comment below. Have a great day, and thanks again for watching. Cheers!
Are you curious to hear more about the benefits of interactive sustainability reports? Email me at info@elizabethjoss.com. If you want to give RELAYTO a free test run, take a look here: https://referral.RELAYTO.com/ewz2wcbyc064.