How to save time and money on your Investor Relations collateral

Your investor relations collateral is so important, we know that, but that doesn’t mean the process of creating it has to be laborious and stressful. There might actually be a better, more efficient way to create your reports and presentations than what you’re currently doing.We’ve put together a Q&A with the Ideaseed investor relations team to talk you through it.

How do Ideaseed help Investor Relations teams?

We help clients present their key information to investors to help them decide if it’s a good investment for them. This can take many forms such as annual reports, investor presentations and roadshows.Investor reports and presentations contain a lot of financial data, using charts and tables to highlight performance and strategy on where the company is heading so we focus on making that really digestible.Essentially, we work as an extension of Investor Relations teams to help design documents and presentations, collate their information and present it in line with their corporate branding.

Why do businesses turn to Ideaseed for Investor Relations collateral?

Many companies outsource their investor reports and presentations to design agencies. It’s a specialist skill that requires experts to manage it – after all, they want to present their company in the best possible light for investors.But where we present an advantage is how we do it. Traditionally designers use Adobe InDesign software to create financial reports, as that’s what they are most familiar with. It produces a good quality output, but it’s not ideal because the clients don’t commonly use Adobe InDesign. This means they can’t make edits themselves, so each round of edits needs to go back to the designers, and it takes longer to produce, creates pressure to meet deadlines and costs much more.Our team of experts at Ideaseed can design and build documents and presentations directly in MS Office Word or PowerPoint. All clients have this software, meaning if they want to make edits themselves, they can! We can also automate a lot of the functions to make MS Office really easy and much faster for everyone to use. An example is clicking a button to format all tables instantly to the correct branding style, or a button to instantly format all charts correctly and paste them into the document. When deadlines are looming, these tools are life saving.

What parts of the reporting process do you handle?

Generally, the Investor Relations team collates the required information from across their business, then we are engaged to help put this information into a format their investors want to see.How much we’re involved depends on that the client need, really. We can provide just the template design so that they have a branded report outline that they can easily populate and edit themselves, or we can create the whole report – design it, create the template, populate the information and take care of the post production and printing, and any other collateral they may need off the back of it.Where we have really added value is going onsite and handling the population of the documents and presentations. When time is of the essence, this is a great way to cut down on time and money spent. We can review with the team, make changes quickly and get the documents finalised. Plus we love the direct feedback and interaction with our clients!

What work have you done recently for Investor Relations teams?

We regularly work with Westpac’s Investor Relations team in Sydney. We redesigned their investor report template, staying close to the Westpac branding. Many of the documents Westpac use to report are heavy on charts and tables, so we simplified these. We focused on making the templates really user-friendly so that the Westpac team can do a lot of the work themselves.When reporting season comes about, we go onsite to help produce their investor reports and presentations, using our templates. When we’re handling their sensitive financial information, it makes sense for us to work onsite with them, particularly regarding compliance and regulation. We’re flexible to however they prefer to work with us, and we stay there working till the wee hours with them if it’s needed!The other benefit of us working onsite is we enjoy sharing our skills with our clients. We can train them individually or as a group to be able to use their templates more productively. It’s a really good result for everyone.When they present their results in person to investors, we add in some animation for the results presentation, and we can add video highlights or anything really! We also help Westpac in producing roadshow presentations for when they present their financial results to investors abroad.

What about smaller companies?

The good thing about our MS Office templates for smaller companies is that someone who’s not an expert can easily populate them themselves.For businesses large and small, it’s worth investing in a user-friendly investor report templates. We see a lot of businesses who have templates that look great but are really clunky to use. When we build templates we include automation so they’re easier and faster to populate. The time saved in using the new templates easily pays for the cost of having us design and build them.We’ve made reporting so much easier for many large and small businesses. To find out more about how Ideaseed can work as an extension of your team head over to our investor relations services page.