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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 24: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Talking About

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.

Xstrata Presentations

As 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.

In this series:
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Next post: Presentations

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 25: Let Investors See What You’ve Been Writing About

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.

Unilever

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.

Unilever

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.

In this series:
Previous post: Presentations
Next post: Additional Information

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 22: Tell Investors When They Can Expect Things

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.

Marks & Spencer financial 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.

In this series:
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What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 4: Share Price Charts

Last week we focused on immediate share price information and today we will be looking at stock charts. At its very basic, a stock chart should clearly convey the price history of a stock over a defined period of time. So at a minimum, a line chart over the past year with a clearly defined axis showing the price is what investors can expect. Most companies also include a volume chart below the share price. Scottish and Southern Energy has a nice example of this simple approach and I’ve reproduced it below.

Scottish & Southern stock chart
Click image to enlarge

You will note that the charting page for Scottish and Southern Energy also includes a selection tool that allows investors to select the time period that they wish to view, ranging from intraday to five years in length.

This is the next iteration of choice for price charts and very helpful for someone thinking about purchasing the stock.

Taking it one step further, some companies also allow user selected dates to define the beginning and end of the chart. This makes sense for people who already own the stock as chances are most investors did not buy the stock on the one, two or five year anniversary of their looking at the chart.

A good example of this capability is the chart of Friends Provident Group, reproduced below, where I’ve arbitrarily chosen to look at the share price performance since the beginning of the year 2000.

Friends Provident stock chartA close inspection of the chart will also show that investors have the capability to chart against other companies (in this case, up to eight pre-selected companies), indexes and sectors.

As an investor, this is useful, because you always want to know “Compared to what?” however, it probably comes under the “Nice to have“ category as opposed to essential information.

Finally, a feature I really like, but which I don’t see that often, is illustrated on the chart from ENI. (If you really want to see a well-executed investor site, visit ENI’s site www.eni.it.)

eni stock price chart
Click image to enlarge

They have overlain their interactive chart with indicators of the release of corporate information. For example, by scrolling over April 24, 2009, you are able to see that the rise in their stock price coincided with the release of ENI’s first quarter 2009 results.

I find this particularly helpful when I look at a large rise or fall on a stock price chart as it often helps me understand what may have been causing the movement.

In this series:
Previous post: Share price information
Next post: Historical share price data

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 3: Share Price Information

Having established last time that a roadmap to the relevant investor information is essential on the main investor relations page, this piece will discuss one of investor relations more popular destinations – the share price page. You might think that this would be a simple enough thing to do – throw a graph of the share price up on the screen and let it go at that. But there is a lot more to it than that and companies that pay attention to this area can save their shareholders (particularly individual investors) quite a bit of frustration by thinking the site through.

The first thing to realize is that there are several distinct sets of information that investors are looking for when they visit your site for share price information. First, there is immediate information: what is the stock price doing now? Next, there is graphical information: what does the price chart look like? Third, there is historical information: what was the stock price on a certain date? I will be breaking down all of these parts in due course, but today I will be concentrating on immediate share price information.

There is a standard set of information that investors expect to see when looking at current price: last trade, open, high, low, change, volume and whether the information is real time or delayed. Below is a screen shot from the web site of ENI, the Italian energy company that does a good job setting out intraday information. Because ENI is traded on multiple markets, they also provide tabs to view the information for the particular market you may be interested in.

ENI-stock-price

Another good example comes from BT, the telecom company, and below is a screen shot of a portion of their page on share price information. Note that BT adds in the P/E ratio and the dividend yield as additional pieces of information on the stock. Further, BT also shows what the relevant index, the FTSE 100 did on the day in question, so you have a reference point, although if they are going to do that, they should include the percentage change for both their stock and the index rather that the pure price change in order to facilitate understanding of the stock price change relative to the index.

BT-share-price-information

Having established what the current trading in the stock is, companies should then move on to placing the stock price in historical context by the use of price chart graphs. In addition to the basics, there are many interesting things companies can do to help investors and I’ll be covering some of them next time.

In this series:
Previous post: Provide a Roadmap
Next post: Share price charts

What Makes for Effective Investor Relations Sites? Part 2: Provide a Roadmap

Having started with the premise that an effective investor web site should give a clear and concise description of what your company does, the next logical thing to do is to provide an easy-to-use roadmap of where the relevant information lies. Most companies choose a format that places a column of links or tabs in either the upper left or right hand side of the main investor relations page. Set forth below is an example of this type of layout as used by Standard Life.

Standard Life investor relations

In looking at a number of websites, I could discern no standard list of what linked sections appear or in what order they are listed. Given that the objective is to enable investors to get the information they need quickly with a minimum of hunting, I would suggest that effective websites think in terms of priorities.

First, certain things are essential to investor relations and an understanding of the company and therefore access to your share price, financial statements annual and interim reports and press releases should be considered a first priority and go to the top of the list.

Of next importance are more discretionary disclosures such as investor presentations, Webcasts, upcoming investor events and the company’s financial calendar. Links that help answer questions for specific groups of investors, such as debt holders or information for individual shareholders administrative items are the next priority that should be included.

Finally, depending on the inclination of the company, the composition of its investor base, and a myriad of other factors, there are links to more specialized information that may prove helpful, such as Corporate Social Responsibility (often seen as a section on its own), corporate governance (also often seen as a separate section), links to the Annual General Meeting materials, and, in the United States, links to Securities and Exchange Commission filings.

Because the subject headings are not uniform and information is often buried two or three links deep, I am a proponent of the use of popup menus as you scroll over the list of links. This enables a visitor to quickly see where information has been placed. It also helps avoid the back and forth hunting for information and waiting for web pages to load that often happens when you click on a promising heading only to find that it doesn’t lead to the information you want. It turns out, that on the web, as in life, you can’t tell a link by its cover.

In this series:
Previous post: What does the company do?
Next post: Share price information