by Tamara O’Brien, TMIL’s roving reporter
Dew-drenched cobwebs spangle the garden… suitcases full of summer clothing are once more rammed under the bed… and there’s a sense of minds, as well as pencils, being sharpened for the new term.
After the long, hot, parallel-universe summer of 2020, autumn is freighted with expectation. For companies, the focus is on rethinking… well, pretty much everything.
Extra pressure, then, on investors, who have to see into the future of a business and assess its prospects. And extra-extra pressure on the annual report, their primary source of information.
Andy Griffiths of the Investor Forum knows all about annual reports. (And pressure: when Andy met Claire across an ICSA annual report judging panel, he caught the gimlet eye of our networker-par-excellence… and another world-renowned expert was recruited to the Trust me, I’m listed team.)
A former equity investor himself, Andy now heads up The Investor Forum. This community interest company (a type of social enterprise) brings large investors and companies closer together – in the interests of both, and in a way that promotes long-term investment and company stewardship.
The other guest today was our own Neil Roberts, Managing Director of Falcon Windsor. As a founding father of Investis 20 years ago, Neil helped shape the digital approach to investor comms in the UK.
So how did these two doyens of investor relations view the current reporting environment? Here are the takeaways.
The eternal duality
Yin and yang. Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote. Both locked in eternal opposition and interconnectedness.
So it is with the annual report. It exists both to tell a company’s unique, engaging, complex story over a single year, while also looking to the future; and to tick machine-readable boxes in regulators’ checklists, so that investors may compare and contrast.
Our team talk with communications agency Quietroom touched on how these two aims can be handled in the AR. Andy also gave us insight into the investors’ world: yes, they really do compare a company’s reports over time, especially the KPIs, to check that actions are being taken and reported on consistently. Something to think about in your next AR content brainstorm.
‘Know thyself’
Understand and articulate your purpose. Give it a cap P if you must. Today, regulators and society in general expect companies not just to look after shareholders’ interests, but to be honourable custodians of the planet and its people. So help investors form the right opinion of you. Give them evidenced information about your work in these areas, and be honest about the challenges.
Join the dots, or you’ll have them joined for you
Build trust by being consistent in every section of your report. If at the front end you state that people are your greatest asset (though we’d recommend a less formulaic expression!), give evidence for this throughout the report, right through to your remuneration pages. If lofty claims made upfront are never referenced again, investors will draw their own conclusions. And perhaps go to less forgiving sources, such as Glassdoor, for clarification.
Equally, be consistent across all communication channels – your website, intranet, social media et al. Engaging all your comms people in the AR process (more on that below) will help greatly with this.
Sweat your AR asset
Annual reports are costly items, financially and in terms of time and effort. So view them as an investment rather than a chore, and make sure you get the best return on them. In his chapter in Trust me, I’m listed, Neil shares his strategies for how to build a communications plan, and use this priceless asset – your company’s accurate, approved story and supporting information – to greatest effect. And how to do that?
Democratise the AR process
It’s not about cutting and pasting bits out of the annual report after it’s published. Don’t make that mistake. Rather, it’s about broadening involvement in the AR development process to include everyone responsible for communicating the company story. This way you’ll ensure that they all a) understand and buy into it and b) use it (and not some other, possibly contradictory story) in what they’re producing. A single, powerful story, consistently told. What’s not to like?