This does not mean that companies can ignore professionals when putting IR information on their own websites, but it does mean that companies must be resigned to having their websites play a secondary role in satisfying professionals' information needs.
Interestingly, even though professional users despised overly promotional or marketing-oriented information on company websites, they did appreciate getting the company "spin" through such things as recent CEO speeches that outlined goals and prospects. Professionals wanted management's vision of where the company was going, along with a brief company background and overview of recent news. Basically, they wanted the company's past, present, and future summarized in a way that told the story behind the numbers.
Typically, private investors don't have access to professional data services, even though they often get data from their broker's website or from services like Yahoo Finance. Individual investors are often intimidated by the vast amount of financial data available, even from these simplified services.
While they expected websites to offer annual and quarterly reports, they admitted that they spent very little time reading them. As the following gaze plot from one of our eyetracking sessions shows, the user scarcely glanced at the dense text, but focused intensely on the lists of links.
The user also spent considerably more time on the information above the fold than on the info on the second half of the page. Gaze plot of a user reading a page of investor information. Each numbered blue dot indicates one fixation of the user's eyes.
Companies can help individual investors by presenting simplified views of financial data and summarizing the highlights. Although you must offer more detailed data as well, users commented positively on websites that summarized essential stock information on a single page. Individual investors also wanted the company to tell them a story about its potential as an investment. Key questions include: Where does the company come from? What is it doing now?
What are its innovation and research prospects? What is its vision? Note, however, that there is a difference between telling a credible, interesting, and concise story, and junking up people's browsers with superficial hype and marketing-oriented language. It's a fine line, but an important one if you want to convince investors of your company's prospects.
In most of our projects, we provide guidelines for interaction design and for principles of information design. We usually cannot recommend the specific website structure, nor can we specify the labels needed for navigation systems.
Consider, for example, a company that sells 5 different kinds of X-ray machines for dentists, and a company that sells 10, different kinds of pumps and valves for OEMs. These two companies require very different IAs for their website's product areas. In contrast, shareholders and potential investors visiting a website's IR area have similar tasks, regardless of the company type. Also, the information that must be supplied to satisfy users' needs is much the same.
Because users and their tasks largely overlap for websites' IR areas, we can recommend a standard IA based on our research of users' information needs and navigation behavior.
If all websites organized their IR information accordingly, it would be substantially easier for users to research investments. We actually recommend 3 different but related IAs, depending on the resources a company wants to devote to online IR.
These low, medium, and high designs gradually add more features based on the priorities we derived from user research. With limited resources, it's best to focus on the features that users need most , and implement them well, rather than clutter the site with many poorly designed features.
Many companies failed in the area of " macro-IA " — that is, the way they distribute and integrate information across multiple sites or subsites. Connect with our experienced practitioners and unbiased Gartner experts to discover innovative approaches to smarter business decisions and more.
Expert insights and strategies to address your priorities and solve your most pressing challenges. Finance Gartner Glossary. Investor Relations IR. Read Now. Sorry, No data match for your criteria. Please refine your filters to display data. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act, also known as the Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act, was passed in , increasing reporting requirements for publicly traded companies. This expanded the need for public companies to have internal departments dedicated to investor relations, reporting compliance, and the accurate dissemination of financial information.
IR teams are typically tasked with coordinating shareholder meetings and press conferences, releasing financial data, leading financial analyst briefings, publishing reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission SEC , and handling the public side of any financial crisis. Unlike other parts of public relations PR -driven departments, IR departments are required to be tightly integrated with a company's accounting department, legal department, and executive management team, such as the chief executive officer CEO , chief operating officer COO , and chief financial officer CFO.
In addition, IR departments have to be aware of changing regulatory requirements and advise the company on what can and cannot be done from a PR perspective.
For example, IR departments have to lead companies in quiet periods , where it is illegal to discuss certain aspects of a company and its performance.
These opinions influence the overall investment community, and it is the IR department's job to manage analysts' expectations. S Congress. Investing Essentials. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Investopedia.
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Investing Investing Essentials. Key Takeaways The investor relations IR department is a division of a business whose job it is to provide investors with an accurate account of company affairs. IR departments are required to be tightly integrated with a company's accounting department, legal department, and executive management team.
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