What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 25: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Writing About
August 31, 2010
In my last installment of this series, I wrote about how posting slides of your investor presentations was helpful to investors. This week, I’m addressing a corollary concern: the need for investors to be able to access a history of a company’s financial press releases. Almost every investor relations web site will include a section on press releases. Unfortunately, where the section is and how much history it contains can vary considerably.
Ideally, a link to news releases should show up clearly on the main investor relations page. This should then lead to a page dedicated to the press releases. Some companies choose to have a separate page for the media that contains all press releases, but in my opinion, investors are better served to have at least a link on the main investor relations page. A better approach is to have financial press releases dealing with earnings, dividends and related financial news in a separate area so that investors can find what they need without hunting through new product introduction announcements or the latest news on charity events sponsored by the company.
Next, companies should give thought to how long the press releases should be up on the site. I have seen companies that arbitrarily cut off the press release history after two years, but this is probably too short a time frame. At the very least, companies should keep financial press releases up for five years or the same period of time for which they are also archiving financial information, whichever is longer. Press releases can be very helpful in understanding management’s thinking at the time of the event, and with electronic storage being as cheap as it is these days, there is no good reason not to have a complete history.
A good example of how to do all of this is on the Unilever site. When you navigate to Unilever’s main investor relations page, one section of the page gives you a link to Press Releases, which is shown right.
Clicking on the link takes you to the Press Release page shown below, which contains a full ten years of releases, enough to satisfy even the most data hungry analyst.
In the end, web sites, if designed well, can make life much easier for investors, and just a little bit of forethought will accomplish that objective when it comes to press releases.
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 24: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Talking About
August 24, 2010
I was recently doing some research on company presentations and so I went out to the Internet to look for good examples of that staple of corporate communications, the PowerPoint slide show. If you go to investor conferences, almost every presenting company will accompany its speech with a slide deck illustrating their main points. As any investor can tell you, the slides are often full of very useful information. So when I wanted to look at how companies approached a particular communications issue, I thought it would be a relatively easy thing to go out and pull up the presentations of the various companies and analyze what I was interested in.
s so often proves to be the case these days, my initial presumption was incorrect. It’s not quite so easy to go out on the Internet and find a representative sample of corporate investor presentations. In fact, what I found was quite surprising: in a random sample of 20 U. S. companies, only five companies (25%) posted their investor presentations (excluding quarterly presentations).
This seems like a serious oversight. It’s not as if the companies don’t want to make the information public – it’s already been placed in the public domain at a conference. It doesn’t seem rational that company management would wish to limit the dissemination of the information on the slides only to those attending the investor conference where they were originally shown. I prefer to think that it is more likely to be oversight.
So here’s today’s thought for making your investor website more effective: place a history of your most recent investor presentations at investor conferences on your website. Not everyone can attend the conferences that you present at, yet this is information that you clearly think investors should know, otherwise it wouldn’t be in the slide deck. So let everybody see them. And keep them there for a while, as they serve as a good reference point to company operations and thinking at any particular point in time.
Above is a good example of a complete history of presentations placed in their investor section by Xstrata, the mining company.
This is a relatively simple thing to do and it helps investor transparency. It should be part of every well designed investor site.
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 23: More on Strategy
August 6, 2010
A while back (Part 18, to be precise) I wrote about the need for corporate investor relations sites to speak about strategy. The basic premise of the piece was that when buying a stock, investors are purchasing a claim on the future cash flows of the company and therefore need visibility into the future plans of the company. Many companies are reluctant to discuss strategy on their investor web sites, however, so when I came across a great example of a strategy discussion, I thought it would be an opportune time to revisit the topic.
Whenever I discuss this topic there is usually some push back from investor relations officers and executives along the lines of “We can’t tell them that – then our competitors would know what we are going to do” or “That’s way more detail than the regulations require us to disclose and therefore we’re not going to do it”. I understand these concerns (well, at least the first one) but feel that the importance of stating your strategy outweighs most concerns about how many of the corporate information you divulge. Besides, there are ways to discuss strategy that do not let the competition in on your innermost secrets.
Take for example the way ENI, the Italian energy company, discusses strategy. They start with a general overall write up of their growth strategy, followed by a tabbed table that sets out their targets in a number of areas and follows that with more detailed discussion of the strategies to achieve their targets.
The strategy discussion is followed up by a page that lays out the company’s growth drivers, so investors can get a sense of how ENI will achieve its strategic objectives.
Finally, the company examines their outlook for the next year, which allows the reader to understand how everything is supposed to fit together.
The overall effect of all of this is to give the diligent investor a sense that ENI has carefully thought out its strategy and is confident enough in its ability to execute the strategy to put it out where everyone can see it. I think this is a very effective strategy section that many companies can learn from.
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 22: Tell Investors When They Can Expect Things
July 29, 2010
Many years ago, I had a sell side analyst tell me, “One of the hallmarks of a well managed company is when you see they publish a calendar of earnings releases… and they stick to their dates”. This leads me to today’s thought on effective company investor relations sites: tell your investors what’s coming up on the calendar… and stick to those dates.
Investors need to know about certain dates, particularly as they relate to dividends, earnings statements and annual general meetings. A well-organized financial calendar will help them find things quickly and with a minimum of fuss. And it will cut down on the number of calls coming into the investor relations department from investors who are interested in those dates. Particularly individual investors concerned about when the dividend is payable. More particularly, retirees living on a fixed income who rely upon the dividends.
With respect to dividends, investors need to know the record date, the ex-dividend date and the payment date. Financial results should be released according to a schedule established before the start of the fiscal year. And just as obviously, the date for the Annual General Meeting should be established well in advance of the event and published on the calendar.
A good example of how to do this is the Financial Calendar placed on the Marks & Spencer web site.
This is not rocket science; it’s just good planning and the communication of that planning to those who need to know. Take it from someone who used to run an investor relations department for a company with a high percentage of individual investors in the days before the internet – a company can save itself a lot of pain and suffering having to do with volume of phone calls if they clearly place on their web site when they expect important, but routine, corporate actions to be taken.
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 21: Annual Reports – Give Readers a Choice in How to Access Them
July 20, 2010
Time was, back in the dark ages of about twenty years ago, people only had one option when it came to annual reports – ink on paper. Nowadays we have a multitude of ways to read things: traditional paper, web based, PDF files and e-readers. And people who are visiting your web site to read your annual report expect to have a variety of ways to access the report. Good investor web site design seeks to incorporate a variety of delivery methods for their investors.
A nicely integrated approach for delivering both a web based report and the ability to download PDF files of the report is demonstrated by Standard Chartered, the financial services company. They start with an electronic cover page, which allows you to navigate to various sections of the report.
Each section in turn allows the reader to easily get to relevant subsections, whether it be by opening a new page to the Chairman’s statement or by clicking and expanding a sections such as operational highlights. One can easily navigate the report in this web-centric manner.
For those readers that wish to read the report in a more traditional, linear fashion, Standard Chartered also provides a download centre. The download centre allows an investor to either choose the entire annual report in a zipped file for quicker download, or pick and choose which sections interest them most for downloading.
In one final interesting piece of design work when you click on the two tabs on the right hand side of the page in the download centre, additional capabilities become visible, such as the ability to email the page or to create a customized PDF file.
Overall, this is a nice piece of design work that addresses the way people navigate for information on the web with the way more traditional readers seek information.
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