Since 2017, I’ve been engaged to produce the annual reports for Somos Amigos Medical Missions, an organization dedicated to providing excellent medical and dental care to remote communities in the mountains of the Dominican Republic.
The need was straightforward: produce a mailed annual report that would be visually appealing and grab a reader’s attention. This was in addition to controlling production and mailing costs, so form was an essential consideration. Rather than a more expensive booklet-based report with bound pages, I chose to retain the organization’s tried and true approach of using a single sheet with a double gate fold.
I was given the latitude to produce illustrative cover designs. The document is folded and tab sealed, with the back cover accommodating a variable data mailing address. The cover stands out among other mail pieces, grabbing the recipient’s attention. The straightforward construction ensures a lower printing and mailing cost as well as ease of address imprinting at the production facility.
The design of the interior also necessitated creating numerous graphics, icons, and graphs to illustrate the statistics within the report, as well as to create a connection to the community of El Naranjito, which means little orange in Spanish.
Aggregated demographic data was provided by the medical and dental clinics, divided into multiple categories: gender, age, and nationality.
The response from recipients was positive and encouraging! Many recipients responded to the organization’s executive director with feedback that the cover imagery was engaging and gave the recipient a feeling of connection to the community in the D.R. One recipient even requested a specially-sized print of the 2020 edition’s cover, which depicts the community of El Naranjito where the clinic is located.
