Union Annual Report 2010

Union Annual Report 2010 (UAR10) expands on the immense success of its predecessor to pave the way for financial transparency at the Rensselaer Union for years to come. UAR10 essentially institutionalizes the format and function of the previous year's UAR so that it can be used for years to come. It incorporates months of feedback received from many people both inside and outside of the Union's governance.

With UAR10, we paid particular attention to combining qualitative information about the year's highlights and club achievements with the already strong presentation of quantitative information to give members of the RPI community a detailed look into what sets the Union apart from other on-campus student unions around the world. Every graph, calculation, and figure is meticulously displayed in all its visual glory.

People often ask which piece of software I used to create the Union Annual Report. Actually, this was a very important consideration from the beginning. While I use the Helvetica family of fonts (Helvetica World and Helvetica Neue are the two dominant typeface families for UAR10) to distinguish the document from others, it's actually created entirely using Microsoft Word 2007 and Microsoft Excel 2007.

This was an intentional choice, as I needed to ensure that people who follow me at RPI would be able to quickly generate future Annual Reports. There's just one set of spreadsheets that are linked through to different views actually responsible for creating the final charts and data tables. Data comes directly from the Union's internal Budget Management System. I am also in the process of training administration support personnel with the report creation workflow.

I joined Tequisha Hendrickson and Alex Franz from the Union Executive Board to present UAR10 at the February 8, 2010, meeting of the Rensselaer Union Student Senate.

You can view the entirety of this presentation at the new RPI TV website (which is another one of my design projects). My part of the talk begins at 2:10 in the video.