As I’m sure you know by now, Dell launched the first Investor Relations blog just over a week ago, to quite a bit of comment around the patch, and they’ve got a couple of posts up now.
This blog is a really very interesting addition to the IR site, and Dell are typically brave to be the first (though I suppose someone has to!). I’m sure it won’t be long before other companies join them … [Read more…] about Blog review: Dell’s IR blog
How can you persuade the green investor to invest in your company, if your environmental credentials are looking rather weak?
Some industries, by their very nature, are going to do more harm to the environment than others. Companies working in consumer services rather than in basic materials are bound to find it easier to ‘go green’, and to target the green investor.
But how picky should the green investor be?
Is it better for the green money to go to the company who is already performing well, and for whom the percentage improvement possible is relatively tiny, or to go to the company who has performed badly in the past, but who is making huge improvements?
Wouldn’t it better for us all, in the long run, to support those companies in the more harmful – but essential – sectors who are doing the most to improve?
Improving the performance of those companies who currently do the most damage to the environment, and rewarding those who manage to make the most improvement each year, will surely make a bigger difference, overall, than rewarding those whose industry has a relatively light footprint in the first place.
We need assessment techniques that show us not only how good/bad each company’s performance is on a number of different measures, but also how much that performance has changed over time. We need to see the trend for each company, and, ideally, to be able to compare this to the performance of other companies.
Some companies make it easy to see how their performance in this area has changed over time, such as BP, who provide 5-year data for visitors to review. It would be great if we could see the same measures on other sites for comparison purposes.
How is CSR performance measured?
There are several major CSR indices, awards, and other methods of assessing a company’s CSR performance, including:
All these are wonderful tools and techniques for reporting and rewarding companies who work hard at CSR. Many companies are signed up to one or more, and some have won awards.
If your company hasn’t considered any of the above – why not think about it now? There are resources available to help on each of the sites above.
However, some companies are excluded by their very nature from some of the above. The FTSE4Good Index, for instance, excludes tobacco companies, weapons companies, and those working in the nuclear industry.
What can be done to support these companies in their efforts to improve?
What can be done to encourage those companies who have no interest in it to improve their performances in CSR?
What are the benefits in CSR – and in green investment?
There are definite benefits to engaging in CSR activities, and these have been outlined many times (see CSR Network for a summary of the argument for CSR), including:
These are the arguments that must be used to persuade companies that it is in their own interests to work on CSR.
Once that’s done, though, how can green-inclined investors be persuaded to invest in companies that are currently not-very-green?
I suggest that the answer is explaining:
Crucially, of course, the company must be persuaded into a CSR programme before this will work – but once it has agreed, getting the green investors on board will surely add momentum.
This post is part of Blog Action Day, in which bloggers around the world are discussing environmental issues.
One year in, what lessons are there to learn about implementing the new strategic report?
At Communicate’s next conference in London, Evolution of the Annual Report, which will take place in early October, attendees will hear from a variety of speakers to find out how the first year of the new-style report has gone, and to hear best practice advice for next year’s reporting cycle.
We love to discover new best practice, and the topics that catch my eye first are those which discuss how to go about creating the report, and what the benefits might be of this new approach:
There are other subjects to be covered too, such as the technological implications of the changes – and at the final session, FutureValue will confer the Strategic Report Accolades on the winners for 2014.
Speakers come from the full range of organisations – corporates, agencies, government, journalists, professional bodies and regulators – including Rio Tinto, National Grid, the ICSA and Board Intelligence.
Sounds interesting? If this event would be useful to you, find out more on the Communicate website.
If your company has a strategy of acquisition – why not explain it to your potential investors?
Imperial Tobacco not only explain who they’ve acquired, but when – and give their acquisition criteria. If I happened to have a company ripe for acquisition, I might be very interested indeed in this information, but even if I didn’t, investors are likely to want to understand this strategy.
[Read more…] about Bought a new company recently?
Are you confident that all the news published about your company is good news – or, at least, that there aren’t going to be any unpleasant surprises?
TNT display confidence in themselves as they publish reports written by external sources about themselves on their own site.
Provision of this kind of third party news and comment about a company can be a useful source of information for both investors and other journalists, and certainly makes their research easier.
TNT will naturally review all mentions of themselves in the newspapers and other journals, and I trust that there is no veto on publishing critical third party news articles on the TNT site.
Just as important as reviewing the newspapers and financial journals for mention of your company is review of what is being said online. Does your company have someone who monitors what bloggers and other online commentators are saying? Did you pick up this post through a Google Alert?
Please contact me if you would like more information on how best to monitor what is being reported about your company online.
Palm, the company that more or less started the mainstream PDA movement, has an interesting little feature on their Investor Relations page called the “Shareholder Briefcase.” It is nothing too complicated really, but a nice touch in the realm of user interaction.
The Shareholder Briefcase is a way for an investor or potential investor using the Palm IR site to collect several documents or files as they explore the information available and determine what they want to take with them to research further. In many ways, it operates very similarly to the shopping cart feature on most e-commerce sites.
Of course, such a feature requires a user to register. Actually, it doesn’t, it could easily be handled by cookies, but that wouldn’t work across multiple browsers or computers, and why pass up the chance to get an obviously interested person’s contact information?
Once registered, the user can navigate the IR portion of the site at their leisure. When they find something that interests them, they just click the “Add to briefcase” icon. 
This keeps the user from having to click and open every PDF file, DOC file, or PowerPoint file they are interested in while they are on the site. Instead, the user keeps a running list of what they have found of interest and then when they are ready, they can either download all the files, or even email all the files to themselves.
Either way, the users of the Palm investor relations web site have a great way to collect all that information and then go through it at their leisure instead of maybe skipping important information due to time constraints, or worse, forgetting a useful document that they wanted to review, but did not open initially.
Can something like this work for any Investor Relations page? Yes. The software to handle something like this already exists in many formats. It may actually be possible to use your company’s existing shopping cart software with just a few modifications to handle functionality similar to this.
You can never go wrong giving the user another way to get what they need.
