Reports are an Online Media
At IRM we are firmly of the view that company reports generally, including presentations, newsletters and so on, should be considered as part of the online presence of a company.
Certainly there will be printed copies of many of the reports, and there will be mailings of those printed copies to interested people. They will also be handed out, will lie around in reception areas of companies and on dining room tables at home, and be a tangible physical form of company information and reassurance to investors.
However, the vast majority of actual reading of most company reports is done online. Australian listed companies publish their reports, presentations and newsletters as ASX Announcements – an entirely online media. They will appear next on the company website, in Email Alerts, on broker websites, in social media and referred to in online news media, all well before the very first printed copy makes its way into an investor’s snail mail letterbox.
Even the “broker presentation” PowerPoint – a favourite offline touchpoint for many companies – will no doubt impress the people invited into the room where the presentation occurs, but many more people will look at the online version of it from the ASX Announcement or the company website.
Reports, presentations, newsletters are all predominately online media. Companies need to consider the way they fit into the overall online presence for investors, and how they assist investors to take their journey to becoming committed shareholders.
So – reports need to look great, both offline and online. Producing a great looking offline document, and then burying it as a 5Mb PDF somewhere in the back of the website, is ignoring the main touchpoint for the report and wasting the time and money spent preparing it. Why not consider doing an Online Report - at least for the Annual Report.