What actually gets a non-technical client to read your project update?

I'll be upfront at the start: I build in this space, so I have a bias — and that's exactly why I want to hear from people who do this daily before I trust my own conclusions.

The problem I keep circling: how do you keep a client genuinely informed about a Jira project when they don't have Jira access and never will — a marketing director or a business owner, not a PM? Technically informed is easy. Actually informed, in a way they read and trust, is the hard part, and I'd like to know what's worked for people in practice.

The patterns I most often see recommended are a weekly written summary (verdict first, then a few plain-language bullets, no ticket keys or story points), a shared Confluence page, or exporting a report. Each seems to break down somewhere:

• A written update is a snapshot, not a state — stale by mid-week, and if the client wonders on Wednesday they email instead of checking anywhere.
• Rewriting Jira into plain English by hand doesn't scale past a couple of projects.
• It's hard to tell if it even landed. No reply usually means "fine," occasionally it means "didn't read it, quietly unhappy."

So for people doing this regularly:

1. What format did you land on, and what did you have to remove before people actually engaged with it?
2. Does anyone push status somewhere the client can check on their own — a page, a dashboard — rather than emailing it? Does it actually get looked at, or does the email still do the work?
3. Has anyone shortened the translate-Jira-into-plain-English step without the result sounding automated? My worry is that the moment an update reads like a machine wrote it, people stop trusting it — curious whether others have found that, or solved it.

Genuinely open to the answer being "it's just a manual writing job." That's a common conclusion, but I'd rather be shown a better one.