Every year, we, at Q4 look forward to networking and the amazing show put on by @irmagazine.

We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate our clients who have been nominated:

Grand prix for best overall investor relations – large cap (C$10 bn and over)

Goldcorp

Best investor relations officer – large cap

Goldcorp

Best IR by a CEO – large-cap

Goldcorp

Best IR by a CEO – mid-cap

Intact Financial

Best financial reporting

Goldcorp

Best investment community meetings

Goldcorp

Best use of technology

Agnico-Eagle

Best Practice of corporate social responsibility

Barrick Gold

Best Crisis Management

Agnico-Eagle

Best IR by a Canadian company in the US Market

First Quantum Minerals

SECTOR AWARDS

Materials
Agnico-Eagle
Barrick Gold
Goldcorp

Real Estate
Riocan

Congratulations and good luck!

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The CRA is in its 60th year and presents awards for excellence in financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure, electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting to companies listed on the TSX and to federal Crown corporations.  Separate excellence and honourable mention awards are also presented to reports that are judged to be the best, regardless of industry sector, in each of these four judging areas.  Lastly, among the industry winners, one company is given the overall award of excellence for corporate reporting.

A lot of the companies were repeat winners from last year and Q4 would like to take this opportunity to extend our congratulations all of them!

Awards of Excellence for Large and Small Federal Crown Corporations:

• Large Crown winner — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
• Small Crown winner – Defence Construction Canada
• Provincial Crown winner – SaskTel

Awards of Excellence for Corporate Reporting: Industry winners:

• Communications & Media – TELUS Corporation
• Consumer Products – Tim Hortons
• Diversified Industries – SNC-Lavalin Group Inc.
• Financial Services – BMO Financial Group
• Forest Products – Catalyst Paper Corporation
• Life Sciences/Technology – Newalta
• Mining – PotashCorp
• Oil & Gas – Suncor
• Real Estate/Utilities & Pipelines – Enbridge

These industry winners received the highest average rankings in the four judging categories: financial reporting, electronic disclosure, sustainable development reporting and corporate governance disclosure.

An Award of Excellence was selected in each of the four judging categories and an Honourable Mention was given for financial reporting, electronic disclosure, sustainable development reporting and corporate governance disclosure.

The judging category winners are:

FINANCIAL REPORTING:

• Award of Excellence – PotashCorp
• Honourable Mention – BMO Financial Group

ELECTRONIC DISCLOSURE:

• Award of Excellence – Agnico-Eagle
• Honourable Mention – PotashCorp

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT REPORTING:

• Award of Excellence – Suncor Energy Inc.
• Honourable Mention – TELUS Corporation

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DISCLOSURE:

• Award of Excellence – TD Bank Financial Group
• Honourable Mention – Nexen Inc.

The Overall Award of Excellence for Corporate Reporting was presented to the most outstanding industry winner in 2011: TELUS Corporation.

Congratulations to all of the winners from the Q4 team!

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This is the second year in a row, that Agnico-Eagle has been recognized at the CRA for their best practice IR website, securing an Honorable Mention in the electronic disclosure category in 2010 – with first place awarded to Potash Corp., a winner in the electronic disclosure category multiple times.

Companies eligible for the electronic disclosure award were judged on specific content relevant to investors, navigation and usability, innovation, overall effectiveness and IR website best practices. This year, companies were also evaluated on how well they integrated social media into their sites.

Agnico’s long-standing commitment to continually improve the investor experience on their IR website is focused on achieving a global standard in best practices. An additional goal is to limit the effort required to update site content.

The strategy for the site evolved from a comprehensive IR website best practice audit of the Agnico site conducted by Q4 and provided to both the client and their design firm, The Works. This document detailed key recommendations, which were adapted in the redesign. A strong collaboration between Q4, The Works and Agnico-Eagle throughout the design and development of the site helped ensure that all key communications objectives were met.

What follows are some of the features that make Agnico’s site exemplar of best practices:

The Design

The talented team at The Works created a clean, progressive design that provides numerous ways for investors to easily navigate the site to not only find the information they are looking for, but to also ensure that they encounter the information Agnico wants them to see. For example, right from the home page the rotating images in the masthead highlight key content and events, and the drop-down main navigation prominently singles out one specific piece of content in addition to providing links to all sub-section information. The navigation also makes it easy for users to see where they are, where they want to go and how to make their way back. The site also brings key content forward by prominently displaying frequently sought information such as news releases and presentations, as well as providing lots of quick links:

Integrated Social Media Galleries

Agnico was interested in making their information more interactive and easily accessible – not just on their site, but in alternate channels as well. The multimedia galleries offer an extensive collection of Vimeo videos and Flickr photos, which Q4’s platform automatically pulls in from the social channels and integrates into their site. Some of these assets are also displayed elsewhere on the site in context with specific information:

Follow Us Page

The ‘Follow Us’ page on the site provides a number of ways to stay connected to the company such as email alerts, RSS feeds, Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo. In today’s multi-channel world, public companies must ’be where their investors are’ to stay connected. Prominently featuring ‘Follow Us’ as a universal link in the site header makes it easy for investors to find this information:

Quarterly Report Summary Page

Agnico’s quarterly summary page provides an aggregate view of all quarterly related materials in a single page. It includes the press release, conference call, webcast, report and financials. Agnico also provides a brief video of their CEO, Sean Boyd who provides commentary on the quarter. (Much of the information in this video is scripted in advance of the earnings call and Agnico’s video production company Silverpoint is able to shoot and produce the video to ensure that this information is on the site on the day of their earnings call.) The right rail in this section is entirely driven by tags. So each time the company reports their quarterly results, the tag on this page (for example Q22011) is updated to the next quarter i.e. Q32011. To address Agnico’s goal of minimizing manual updates, Agnico touches the content once and the information automatically aggregates on the quarterly page (and other pages, such as the Investor Briefcase, Presentations etc.).

Interactive Financial Data

The interactive financial data also called the ‘operational database’ on the Agnico site, is an innovative investor service that gives analysts a full set of interactive quarterly financials and fundamentals. Provided by our partner, Virtua Research the financial database permits customized charts, excel downloads and the ability to share content from the model through email and social networks:

This award underscores the commitment and effort Agnico puts into continually making their IR website an integral part of communicating their story to investors. Congratulations from the team at Q4 to everyone involved!

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C: Often I hold your site up as a best practice example for other companies but the response I get from some IROs is, “We don’t have the same size team as a company like Potash – we don’t have that kind of budget.” What’s your response to that?

T: People think we have a much bigger team than we actually do. We have only just recently hired someone specifically for the web and we’ve been a two-person department up to that point.

The reality is that you can have a good site, regardless of your budget by addressing some of the things we talked about before: navigation, architecture, usability and a good story. These things are not expensive, they just require thinking and strategy – it’s a necessary investment of time upfront in ‘thinking’.

PotashCorp makes it easy for analysts to immediately access data they would normally have to spend hours building models in order to view using the datatool as shown below:

With our site the majority of the cost was in the backend development, but 70% of the effort went into the thinking, planning and strategy.

The big question is, “Have you thought about your story? Have you thought about how to communicate it and the assets you already have in terms of telling the story (photos, presentations etc.)?”

If you do the proper strategic planning to ensure that you achieve your communications objectives and then build the site so it’s easier and more cost effective to maintain and evolve, the time and money you spend will give you a significant payback.

C: Potash tends to put more content on its site than most organizations do about the company, market opportunity, investment proposition – information that provides a broader context. Where did the idea come from to do this? Did you find that investors were asking questions about this kind of information?

T: Absolutely. We struggled for many years because we are in an industry that not many people are familiar with. If nobody understands your business, it’s not going to be easy to get people to invest. So we’ve focused a lot of energy on how we tell our story and how we’ve evolved it.

Potash provides good context and background on their company, their markets and their investment proposition via the “Why Invest” as shown below:

C: Your story is really tight now – it’s very compelling.

T: And it continues to evolve and improve. That’s the great thing about the web. If you go out to a conference and you’re telling the story and you feel that something is not quite where it should be, you can go back and tweak it. It’s easy to evolve your story online – you don’t have to wait for the next annual report to come out in order to do this.

C: Prior to doing the things you’re doing now, before investors understood your story, did you find that conversations were taking place at a much more basic level? Were the calls more repetitive than they are now? In other words, do you find that now your conversations with investors are more enhanced, because they understand your company better based on the information they are able to access on your website?

T: Absolutely. This is the payback. We have a very small team relative to other companies. We had two people, so when the interest in agriculture exploded in 2007, (and with it the interest in PotashCorp as a major play), we were under water with the demands for information. And approximately 70% of the questions we were being asked were all the same. So if you build your site in such a way that the information users are looking for is easy to access, people are willing to do their own work to find it. So by the time we’re talking with them, much of the basic information has already been dealt with – and if these same questions do come up, you can direct them to your site.

C: We have a client who used to get 50 calls a week from individuals in the early stage of the investor life cycle, who asked the same questions in call after call. After structuring the website to better tell their story, the number of repetitive 101-type calls reduced to just 2 per week. Now the calls she is getting are with investors who already have a basic understanding of their company and value proposition.

T: That again speaks to the payback. People make excuses as to why they can’t do a more effective job of the web – but look what they’re missing!

C: I like the way that you don’t try to cover everything in an FAQ. Instead, you thoughtfully layer your story so the user gets more and more information as they move through the site. It’s very engaging and it makes a big difference to the experience.

T: That’s what we set out to do. One of the biggest changes we made with the new site was not to cut and paste content from documents like the annual report, but instead to specifically write content for the web. Doing this allows us to layer the information more effectively and in a way that makes it easier for users to digest the information.

C: What about your analytics – are they telling you that site users are looking at the context you provide around your organization? Or are they just looking at the filings and press releases?

T: We use Google analytics and it shows us that people are doing their research – they’re reading the background on the company and the industry. Of course people that come back time and time again are mostly looking for the new updates. That comes back to addressing all phases of the investor life cycle. Overall we get a broad use of content across our site.

C: Is there anything that you think companies consistently miss in planning the strategy for their website?

T: Most companies don’t take enough time to think about their stakeholder groups in terms of ‘what do they want?’ and importantly, ‘what do you want from them?

C: It’s interesting that you should say this. I’ve been saying this a lot lately, especially in consideration of the template providers. It’s not just about making it easy to find things, it’s also about, what does your company want to say? What content do you want your users to see? And how do you present that information to move your users through your priority content?

T: Not addressing that aspect is a fundamental flaw. Companies have a communications opportunity and if they don’t use it, that’s a missed opportunity. Companies have to think about the web that way – it’s a part of a communications strategy. You have people coming to your site, but you’re also outreaching and you have to be telling your story, you have to reflect your brand. There are CEOs and CFOs that don’t understand that there is a payback for doing this right and doing it well happens over time.

You can’t establish the web channel quickly. You have to make the website a good experience – so users don’t have to think that hard and so they regularly come back for more information. This helps establish your channel.

Our strategy really worked for us in the BHP situation. Our stakeholders were already used to going to our website for information and so it made it easier for us to address this situation. We had the ‘go’ (issues) website up and ready in no time. We had the story. We had video of our CEO discussing the takeover on YouTube, and we had a good experience already established. The web was essential to addressing BHP’s acquisition efforts. That’s the type of payback that you get – when a crisis hits, you’re ready.

C: What are the top 4 things a company should do to have a great website?

1. Understand your stakeholder needs and your organizational objectives.
2. Start with an overall communications strategy to ensure consistent messaging across all communications and therefore, a better understanding of your story.
3. Build the site in a way that is easy to use – don’t make users have to think to find things.
4. Ensure that your site is easy to maintain and can evolve to keep pace with new advances in the way the web is being used.

C: My feeling is that a website is never finished – so how do you plan for continuous improvements?

T: You’re right – it’s the story that never ends. There’s two things that we do, one hard and one soft:

1. The hard one being the technology side – you need to use programming that can evolve. And we rely on Zu quite a bit for their advice on this. You don’t want to corner yourself with technology that doesn’t evolve.
2. In terms of the soft side – the content and the thinking behind what we do – we conduct research and we rely on our vendors in terms of what they see: Creative Fire, who handled the redesign and were the primary driver for assisting on the communication strategy; and Zu, who were essential in planning and technical  execution (bringing together the big outside box ideas). We talk to Q4 and read your information, we’re involved in the CICA, we’re involved in CIRI etc. The research aspect is about being out there and having your finger on the pulse and looking at what’s going on in the web world – and not just in the corporate world, because ultimately what’s happening beyond ‘corporate’ ends up leaking down. It’s looking at ideas that are working well in other areas (such as B2B and B2C) and then applying these in the corporate environment.

C: Anything else you’d want to add?

T: Just keep up the good work – the research you’re doing, the evolution of your product, it’s very important.

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Recently I interviewed Tim Herrod, Director, Treasury (C.A.) and former Manager, Investor Relations with PotashCorp, who was instrumental in helping to plan both the award-winning former site and current redesign, which was launched in January of 2010.

Having had 18 months since the re-launch to gather feedback and metrics as well as surviving the high-profile hostile takeover by BHP Bilton, I caught up with Tim to find out more about their approach to web communications and the impact this has had on their IR program.

I have excerpted segments of our interview in a two-part series, beginning today:

C: When I heard you speak a few years ago at a CIRI conference, you said, “Potash views its website as being its primary communications channel. How did you come to that conclusion and why do you view the website as being so important?”

T: Very simply, the web is how people get information. We have a large institutional following, but investors are not institutions – they are individuals within the institutions. These individuals may be at very different points in the investor life-cycle and as such, may have very different information requirements. Whether it’s up front where they have to spend a tremendous amount of time modeling, learning the business, learning about the management team and asking questions – everything that’s involved in making that first ‘invest or not’ decision – those investors have to be covered off at that particular stage of their life-cycle.

Once they have that base knowledge established, they then go into another stage of the life-cycle, which is ‘keeping up’. At this stage, they need certain types of information to help them maintain their view and understand the things that are happening at the company – things that are driving our business, our earnings and therefore, the value of the company.

We have to consider that everywhere around the world, we have individuals who are at different stages in this life-cycle. And we have to be prepared to address their information requirements, wherever they are and whenever they need it. The web allows you to do this 24/7.

There is a place for various forms of communication: speaking at conferences, producing an annual report once a year etc., but when you look at how people are getting information today, it’s clear that the web can consistently deliver what they need, when they need it and in a very dynamic way. This makes for a simple value proposition to take to management to say that we need to build out this channel. And that’s what we did. It was a no-brainer.

PotashCorp Communicates transparency right from the homepage (as shown below) where site visitors are invited to ask the COO a question:

C: When you set out to redesign your new site, what were your top objectives?

T: We did a creative brief and set our goals upfront. They were:

1.   To align the site with our organizational goals and key messages. We have a broader communications program – the web is just one part of that, although it certainly is the main component for our investor stakeholders. From a consistency standpoint – so that users understand our organizational goals across all our communications – we wanted to make sure that the website was aligned with everything else.
2.  To update the technology of the site to align with current best practices and better prepare us to evolve with advances in technology. Although nobody knows where technology is going to take us over the next few years, we didn’t want to be held back, as we were with the old site. We are now better prepared for evolution than we were before.
3.  To update the design on a number of levels. We reduced the number of sections to better relate to our primary users. For example, we felt that corporate governance and sustainability were core values “about” PotashCorp and relevant/critical to all our stakeholders, not stand alone main navigational items, so we moved these into the ‘About’ section. We also wanted to make sure that the application of the brand and the look and feel was consistent across the site. The former site had sections that were bolted on and so the user experience was inconsistent as they moved through the site. We wanted to improve that experience across the site and ensure consistency of the brand. Although the IR department drives the site at Potash, we involved other groups in the project, such as HR, and this really helped to build out the content and ensure a good experience for all users.
4.  To simplify the stakeholder experience by eliminating repetition, tightening up the navigation and making it easy for users to access content (without having to think). We accomplished this through things like relational links, the library, the data tool etc. To prepare for our redesign we did a user survey on the old site, where we asked a concise set of questions such as: why they came to the site and what they were looking for – this helped guide our planning. Another key aspect of the simplification was writing specifically for the web, which is something we hadn’t done before. Previously we were copying and pasting from other documents. Writing for the web causes you to think about how you’re going to layer content to take advantage of web tools and make your information more accessible and interactive.
5.  And finally, we wanted to respond to stakeholder needs to provide more relevant and frequent updates. If you look at the ‘News’ section on our site in comparison to other sites, we have it organized by topic, by keyword, by date. And it’s not just for investors – it addresses all our stakeholders. We have industry information, career, community and financial news. Being successful with this approach is about having tentacles that reach out to all areas within the company and saying, “What’s going on?” and then having a content development process for this information. People across the company are constantly thinking ‘this information might be something that our stakeholders would be interested in’ and then the technology has been set up to accommodate the flow of information.

PotashCorp integrates news for all stakeholders and allows information to be accessed by date, topic or searched by keywords (as shown in the image below):

Another example of how we responded to stakeholder needs is in the creation of our financial data tool. We went from having 7 analysts in 2006 to having 32 analysts now. This is just on the sell-side, and if you think of the buy-side and the people around the world who are building their own models, that’s a lot of effort going into something that you could make easier for them. Instead of leaving them to do that work, we built a data tool and populated it with the information that people are looking for. Then we can say, “Go to the website.”

C: Your site has already won some prestigious awards. What kind of feedback have you received from your stakeholders?

T: The feedback we get from investors is very positive in terms of how well we address their needs.  The bankers tell us that when people have questions about the company or the industry… they say, “Go to the Potash website – it’s the best website in the world.” You know you’ve hit the mark if you get feedback that the early stage investors get the information they need.

C: I think that if you design a website properly – and by design I mean look & feel, structure, navigation, content – it almost acts like a conversation.

T: Yes, and if you put a face to it, then you know who the conversation is occurring with. That’s why you see so many photographs on our site of our people and management team. You can’t meet with all people face-to-face but our approach shows that we are trying to connect with people – we are trying to let them see the whites of our eyes.

You can’t just focus on the actual content – the words only – because how it’s presented is so much more important. If you can’t deliver it successfully, the web just doesn’t work.

C: I agree. When I look at investor sites, particularly in the U.S. where templated IR websites are so dominant, they are often little more than repositories of regulatory filings and data feeds. If you want more context about a company and its investment proposition, you really have to dig for it. And frequently that information is just not there, so the site is doing nothing more than addressing compliance requirements. Do the companies who have these filing cabinet sites just not understand the web or have they just not prioritized it?

T: It seems that they just don’t recognize the opportunity they have with the web or the impact that a good site can have on their IR program. I just gave a presentation a couple of months ago to the CICA with Tony Zuck from Zu and Kelly Freeman, Manager Investor Relations at PotashCorp – the person responsible for our website now. As we prepared for this presentation, Tony spoke of numerous examples of companies who had great stories that were buried deep within their website or in a PDF tucked away in a library. Most users would never see this great information. This is just a lost opportunity.

For any publicly traded company, the number one concern of investors is “what’s the big bogeyman that is hiding out there – that I don’t expect – that’s going to get me.” The way you communicate on the web can show that you are transparent, that you’re putting the information out there and investors can see the whites of your eyes. It helps to build trust. That’s a very important thought process that you have to go through in planning your website.

The web is not just a document repository; it’s a communications opportunity, a management opportunity, a strategic opportunity. The companies that do the best job of brand and brand governance, not surprisingly, also typically do a good job in their web strategy and their stakeholder outreach. These companies are thinking about brand governance when they are creating their communications strategy for the web.

C: With the recent market volatility, I have feedback from some IROs who have been charged with cutting communications budgets, including reducing their spend on web communications. It seems strange to be cutting back on communications at a time of heightened investor uncertainty and concern. What do you think?

T: I absolutely agree with you. We did not pull back budgets, although I’m not sure it’s a budget question only. It’s more important to communicate in a crisis (of any kind). You may get sucked into an economic crisis by no fault of your own, but the business has to have a strategy for facing these challenges and investors and other stakeholders need to understand your strategy, and hear from you often. Uncertainty adds risk, risk reduces valuation, and transparency can help to offset that. There are newer, more innovative and less expensive ways to communicate MORE. So if facing budget pressure, be more innovative – and the web/social media provide great opportunities.

We’ll be issuing part 2 in this series soon – stay tuned!

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The Orange County NIRI Chapter awards program is in its 17th year and is recognized as one of the oldest and most renowned annual report and IR competitions in the United States. You can read more here: http://bit.ly/nXAIVt

Ryder System is one of our newer clients who were previously using Thomson’s template based solution. Upon signing on, the first order of business was to redesign their site and enhance the user experience. The company enlisted Mentus, a top-notch design firm based out of San Diego for the redesign who worked with Q4’s implementation team and Ryder to create a best practice interactive investor site:

While moving to the Q4 Web platform now opened up endless possibilities to improve Ryder’s ability to communicate their story and investment proposition. The Q4 platform also enabled Ryder to expand their growing social media activities as well as offering cool features like an investor tool kit that contains a suite of interactive tools that make it easy to view, print or download financial and operational information:

There are many more awesome features to be seen, so I encourage you to visit the live site at http://investors.ryder.com.

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The CRA is in its 58th year and presents awards for excellence in financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure, electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting to companies listed on the TSX and to federal Crown corporations.  Separate excellence and honourable mention awards are also presented to reports that are judged to be the best, regardless of industry sector, in each of these four judging areas.  Lastly, among the industry winners, one company is given the overall award of excellence for corporate reporting.

A lot of the companies were repeat winners from last year and Q4 would like to take this opportunity to extend our congratulations to all of them!

Awards of Excellence for Large and Small Federal Crown Corporations:

• Large Crown winner — Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation
• Small Crown winner — Telefilm Canada

Awards of Excellence for Corporate Reporting: Industry winners:

• Communications & Media – TELUS Corporation (’08 winner)

• Consumer Products – Canadian Tire Corporation, Limited (’08 winner)
• Diversified Industries – SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. (’08 winner)
• Financial Services – TD Bank Financial Group
• Forest Products – Cascades Inc.
• Life Sciences/Technology – MDS Inc. (’08 winner)
• Mining – PotashCorp (’08 winner)
• Oil & Gas – Nexen Inc. (’08 winner)
• Real Estate/Utilities & Pipelines – TransAlta Corporation (’08 winner in Utilities & Pipelines)

These industry winners received the highest average rankings in the four judging categories: financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure and electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting.

An Award of Excellence was selected in each of the four judging categories and an Honourable Mention was given for corporate governance disclosure, sustainable development reporting and electronic disclosure.

The judging category winners are:

FINANCIAL REPORTING:

• Award of Excellence – PotaschCorp.
• Honourable Mention – Bombardier Inc.

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE DISCLOSURE:

• Award of Excellence – Nexen Inc.
• Honourable Mention – TD Bank Financial Group

ELECTRONIC DISCLOSURE:

• Award of Excellence – PotashCorp.
• Honourable Mention – Talisman Energy Inc.

SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT REPORTING:

• Award of Excellence – Suncor Energy Inc.
• Honourable Mention – Potash Corp.

The Overall Award of Excellence for Corporate Reporting was presented to the most outstanding industry winner in 2009 – PotashCorp.

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Canada’s Emerging Growth Companies are a tiny elite. Most of the tens of thousands of businesses launched each year in this country fail within a few years. Even among the survivors, only a precious few expand at anything close to the blistering pace of the PROFIT HOT 50, whose revenue growth averaged 1,007% over the past two years.

In spite of sectoral downturns, qualified worker shortages, prospects’ reluctance to buy from a young firm, and currency fluctuations, every HOT 50 firm at least doubled its revenue from 2006 through 2008, and 13 grew by at least 1,000%. The extraordinary performance of the PROFIT HOT 50 goes beyond the top line. Fully 70% were already in the black in 2008.

Click here for a short interview “Climb the mountain from the top down” with Darrell Heaps about how Q4 got started.

source: Canadian Business Online

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By reading their reports and following their guidance, any IRO in North America can improve the standards of their company’s stakeholder communications.

To familiarize you more with their work, I have provided an overview of their most recent study, Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders.

Many of you may be familiar with the CICA’s annual Corporate Reporting Awards (CRA) – a program that honours excellence in financial reporting, corporate governance disclosure, electronic disclosure and sustainable development reporting. This high profile event is now in its 57th year. (Darrell and I have volunteered as panel judges in the Electronic Disclosure category of the CRA for 5+ years and through this experience; have come to highly respect their work).

The CICA’s Research Studies Department examines all aspects of corporate reporting, and document their findings in detailed, thoughtful publications. (For a list of publications relevant to this topic, see Performance Reporting).

The purpose of our presentation to the group was to provide input and spur further discussion regarding the implication of Web 2.0 (social media) on corporate reporting for their upcoming research publication, Using the Internet for Corporate Reporting (a first draft is expected to be completed by Fall ’09).

Our presentation turned into more of a conversation as we discussed the growth of social media in investor relations, the factors driving this growth, the various ways that issuers currently use social media to expand their reach and ‘participate in the conversation’, the ways in which stakeholders are consuming information online and our thoughts on future trends. (We’ll cover much of this in an upcoming webinar on social media in investor relations, so drop us a line sherylj@q4wbsystems.com if you’d like to attend).

The group was so engaged in their work that I decided to reread their 2008 publication Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders and highlight a few things.  I encourage you to check it out.

The document examines practices and important trends in corporate reporting by looking at 125 companies across a number of years and considers various reporting formats, including corporate/IR websites.

It begins by examining the purposes of reporting, the various audiences, their information requirements and the priority of this information.

The report identifies and defines all required content types that comprise each information category (e.g. Corporate Overview). It documents the percentage of the companies studied who provided this specific content. It references and quotes existing research relevant to the topic. It then provides the study group’s deliberations and conclusions on the priority of content types within each category, and also lists specific examples of companies who exemplified the specific requirements in their reporting. Appendices for each category provide guidance for those responsible for corporate reporting and include a series of questions that “merit consideration if corporate reporting is to more effectively meet the information needs of investors and other stakeholders”.

In my mind, this format gives the IRO everything they need as a benchmark for their own improvements.

I have listed the various categories here and have pulled out a comment for each to provide a flavour for the document, but in no way does this represent a complete summary of the information included in the report.

• Corporate Overview – the areas where companies scored lowest were in providing information on company ownership and control as well as management committees.
• Social Responsibility – defined as “measuring, disclosing and being accountable for organizational economic, environmental and social impacts”. Although increasingly relevant to stakeholders, there are no standards for reporting in this area although “New global reporting standards are being developed to provide assurance on matters such as financial implications of climate change.” Scores indicated that many companies were still not reporting on social or environmental responsibilities.
• Review of Operations – interesting that only 66% of companies provided information on competitive conditions in their market or industry while only 12% provided a ‘response to change’ – information on how the company has responded or plans to respond to changes in the operating environment and external factors.
• Financial Summary & Analysis – the majority of companies included the required content types for this category with scores being in the mid to high 90s. Analysis of cash flow and historical summary were the areas where companies fell short.
• Supplementary Information – fewer than 46% of companies provided a glossary of terms even though it was considered important to “facilitate the assessment and interpretation of an organization’s activities”.

Additional topics included:

• Enhancing Corporate Reporting – moving beyond the numbers and dense, jargon ridden text. This area included a number of findings and recommendations including:
  o Readability – most corporate reports did not include enough white space, photos, illustrations, graphs and charts.
  o Delivering Key Messages – reports need to maintain a narrative thread to provide investors with a clear linkage from markets, to strategy to key performance indicators, to future goals.
  o Communicating Effectively – must be mindful of all audiences, recognizing the various levels of financial literacy, diverse interests and disparate needs. The first four pages of the report continue to be key – “many casual readers do not look beyond this point and even sophisticated analysts need a reason to read on”.
• Summary Corporate Reporting – Information overload is a big problem in corporate reporting. Research referenced in the report indicates that “Decision-making performance can be impaired by heavy data loads”. Consequently companies need to access not only the information requirements of each user group/audience, but also the level at which you need to address each piece of information.  Paul-Emile Roy, a principal in the Research Studies Department, said that communicators need to evaluate whether a piece of information, “Simply requires ‘commentary’ – 1 or 2 sentences; an ‘explanation’ or a detailed ‘analysis?”. A seven-step process was provided to address information overload. The group concluded that the three most important criteria for Summary Reporting. In order of priority these were:

1. President/CEO letter

2. Financial and operating objectives

3. Performance compared to objectives

• Corporate Reporting on the Internet – In an analysis of corporate investor websites, 90% of surveyed companies did not include more than 8 of the 24 essential information items. Five essential items were not included at all. This led the group to conclude that the majority of companies use the corporate website only as a library to store company reports.

The 202-page report is filled with interesting observations and recommendations and is available as a free PDF download or $47.50 for a hard copy. I highly recommend this report and suggest that you keep the CICA and its publications on your radar screen.

The study group on Corporate Reporting to Stakeholders has committed to three remaining reports that will include:

• Using the Internet for Corporate Reporting – the corporate/IR website is now recognized as the primary source of investor information.  As the reach, immediacy and speed of the Internet continues to grow – along with the variety of online formats and applications, a detailed study covering corporate reporting on the Internet will be a welcome resource. A draft of the study is expected this fall.
• Corporate Sustainability Reporting – I found the group’s perspective on sustainability a telling sign of how far we’ve come in this area. “We see corporate sustainability as a key driver in the health of an organization and an important aspect of a company’s strategy. It sits at the centre of how a company conducts business”.  As most companies use the  website for reporting on sustainability matters, there is quite a bit of overlap between this topic and Using the Internet for Corporate Reporting. But the group will be separating these two topics as much as possible to isolate specific recommendations. It is expected that a draft of this report will be available in the spring of 2010.
• Governance Disclosures – again overlap exists between this topic and the previous two. Governance is clearly tied to sustainability. The group has not determined a release date for this publication.

IROs would be well advised to explore the work of the CICA and its research department. Their in-depth analysis conducted by IR professionals and industry experts and summarized in low-cost reports offers a tremendous value to companies looking to improve their corporate reporting to stakeholders.

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