At the heart of any great investor relations program sits the data and analytics that help to both build a data-driven strategy, as well as analyze the success and performance of key business drivers.
An Investor Relations Officer must act as a conduit for information from the street, to the C-Suite and the Board of Directors. The reporting of key performance indicators helps demonstrate how a strategy, objective, or message is resonating with shareholders. It also enables the IRO to highlight where there is a potential disconnect between what you are communicating, and what investors are “hearing”.
However, collecting data from multiple sources and creating a report that clearly communicates valuable insights to stakeholders can be a tedious and labor-intensive process. This led to the recent innovation in our Desktop platform. By integrating the IR CRM, AI targeting, and capital markets intelligence into a singular platform, we are uniquely able to aggregate data across the IR program, which can then be visualized and packaged for stakeholders.
Streamlining and simplifying the IR workflow with Q4 Desktop has enabled the introduction of our new Report Builder tool. Here are a few key features that our clients have found to be extremely valuable when creating key reports for management.
Building standardized and repeatable reports
Instead of starting from scratch each quarter, standardizing and automating report creation helps save time and eliminates the manual efforts of traditional report creation. With a significant proportion of the data that management requires being the same each quarter, Report Builder makes it easier for you to set up graphs, charts, and other visuals into your standard board report. Your quarterly process can now be accelerated by updating the visuals with a matter of a few clicks rather than re-building the report each time.
Having this level of automation during what is traditionally the busiest and most stressful weeks of the year, can eliminate time lost to inefficiencies or busywork.
Reporting on performance
There are several different methods to measure performance, including stock price and valuation, relative to a meaningful comparison such as peer group, industry, or index.
In collaboration with a group of leading IROs, we focused development within Report Builder on a set of predefined widgets that were configured based upon what is traditionally seen in board reports. By selecting any of the pricing performance data sources, we can quickly place a chart (that can be changed to table, bar, pie, line etc.) to visualize performance in the past 3 months.
These widgets can then be customized by adding additional insights by adding index or peer performance to provide a benchmark to performance. Once set-up these charts can live on past the quarterly report, as a standard, easy-to-update graph.
Viewing shareholder composition
By leveraging up-to-date market insights, management can easily digest investors by style, turnover, region, and by recent purchases/sales. In particular, the top 10 shareholders widget enables you to easily track the impact of your efforts to actively manage the current shareholder base, ensuring there is an understanding of positional changes on a year-over-year basis.
For both shareholder composition and performance, information is not only integrated into configurable charts and figures within the Report Builder, but also can be exported into larger, detailed excel spreadsheets where information can be further analyzed or integrated into reporting materials.
Providing program updates
The activities driven throughout the 90 days between board reports represent a significant amount of efforts across conferences, NDRs, investor/analyst meetings, or other ad hoc meetings. Providing an overall Program Update is a best practice spoken to by many seasoned IR professionals.
By integrating market intelligence with IR CRM data, you can provide both the “look back” and “look forward” assessment of your street engagement from one platform. Activity data can be readily exported by either building a custom data source within Report Builder or using the standard activity export which includes contact, institution, location, and dates.
Creating more time for delivering your strategy
Automating the aggregation of quantitative data on performance, shareholder composition, and program updates makes it significantly easier to paint a complete picture of how your strategy is resonating—alongside other assessments like perceptions studies, consensus estimates, and ratings.
The close collaboration with IROs globally in the development of Report Builder has been key to functionality that we are excited to see enable communicating to management. By making quantitative assessments much easier to pull, we can clearly enable IROs to add valuable data and insights to their in-depth perspectives, to help immediately showcase strategic wins, and pinpoint new opportunities. To learn more about Report Builder, check out my last post, New Technology for an Evolving Workflow.
