Easy-to-find contact details and essential financial data
A simple, clean and well-laid out IR website has a lot going for it. As long as your investors and analysts can find what they’re looking for, it is very much doing its job. Andrea James, senior vice president of corporate strategy and investor relations at Axon Enterprise, is a fan of the uncomplicated approach. She says quarterly earnings and the company’s investor deck are the primary ways Axon communicates its story to investors and analysts, referring to its appendix slides in the investor deck in 90 percent of shareholder conversations – so it is essential this visual material is easily accessible on the firm’s IR home page.
A basic site will paint a picture of what the company does and where it is going
‘I may be a lone wolf, but I don’t believe that automatically playing videos and including fancy bells and whistles are necessary for an investor relations site,’ James says. ‘The main purpose of the site should be to serve as a document library that makes it easy to access financial information and commentary.’
Rebecca Koar, IR lead at Ascend Wellness Holdings, notes the key first impression your site makes on behalf of the company and investor relations.
‘Your IR website is critical,' she says. 'It is the first place investors and potential investors will go when they are looking for information about your company.’ It also serves as a landing spot for various other stakeholders, she adds, including potential employees, business partners, customers, government bodies and more.
‘A basic site will paint a picture of what the company does and where it is going,’ Koar says. For her, these basics can be covered in nine key elements:
Financial disclosures, including all SEC filings
Future event information and the IR department calendar
Marketing material, which Koar says should allow viewers to easily understand what the company does, what the strategy is, how it is performing financially and how it will likely perform in the future
Contact information for both IR and the transfer agent
Company news and announcements, including all press releases
An overview of management
Governance information, including details on the board, the committees and key governance policies
Broader corporate ESG information, including key metrics and ESG reports but also details on key ESG initiatives and resources
Analyst information.
Regarding this last point, Koar says: ‘It is helpful to include a listing of all your sell-side coverage, so investors know where to go to obtain independent research.’
The main purpose of the site should be to serve as a document library
Interestingly, research estimates is an area where IR websites fall short of what investors would like to see. Equity research analyst estimates do not feature as commonly as institutional investor interest in them, according to IR Magazine’s research. A quarter of North American investors identify such analyst estimates as a key feature of interest on IR websites, despite them being practically unheard of on the IR pages of North American companies.
They appear on more than a third of European IR web pages, where approaching half of investors identify them as a key feature they wish to see.
Broadly, however, what investors want from an IR site matches what is being delivered: the most common features on an IR website are press releases, event and report schedules and a named IR contact. All of these are in institutional investors’ top three requested features.
Axon Enterprise’s Andrea James says her company recently added a trending schedule to its quarterly updates. It consists of an Excel spreadsheet of publicly disclosed information in shareholder letters.
‘We think it’s important to help the investment community get up to speed quickly,’ she says. ‘If we can save a junior analyst somewhere from having to go through all our quarters and key data into Excel, we are happy to do it. Guess where we got the idea for the trending schedule? Our shareholders! We always listen to them and try to provide what they find most helpful.’
