The nonprofit sector in Canada is large and very diverse, ranging from religious groups and front-line charities to sport clubs and cultural organizations of all types and sizes. In 2007, the CA-Queen’s Centre for Governance established the Voluntary Sector Reporting Awards to encourage more transparent financial reporting in the not-for-profit sector. Since then, we’ve had the opportunity to examine at the annual reports of over 70 different Canadian charities ranging in size from $250,000 to over ten million in revenue. Given these organizations self-select into the competition, if anything we are seeing reports of not-for-profits that think they are doing a good job of reporting. We find that the common theme for superior annual reports is the telling of a story that engages readers and gives them sound reasons for supporting a charity and its work. But this is not just a creative writing opportunity or an advertisement; it is an accountability document for an organization’s stakeholders that can be very much improved on as a comparison of the best practices we found across organizations shows. Hence, we discuss ten lessons that we learned in the VSRA competition about how to improve this important accountability document.