Take your Boardroom Success Global (Part 2)

In part 1 of this series (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/take-your-boardroom-success-global-part-1-rowland-hirst) we provided an overview of how you can take the successful pitch in the boardroom pre-earnings announcement into the post result stakeholder engagement cycle and in to the AGM. In this part, we focus on frequency and changing engagement preferences.

Frequency: Introduce convenience, efficiency and better measurement in to the mix and it provides opportunity. With group virtual meetings, that opportunity is to offer more frequent meetings for your staff and for your top shareholders. Since the Forum 360 platform is global and simple, you can start to think less about meeting targets by countries and cities and more about the convenient time to offer them a meeting from their desktop or mobile phone. Run your staff town halls from the convenience of their mobile or desktop no matter where they reside in the world. Using Forum 360's solution the experience for your staff members is more akin to a fireside chat than a seminar. Rather than Travelling twice a year to Boston, travel once and offer your investors at last two more meetings through the year than they are used to. If you have not been on an international or roadshow before then use Forum 360 to lead your international expansion.

Forum 360's platform is a great way to manage incoming meeting requests and we are all well aware of the rise of ESG, now the bias of 25% of the world's professionally managed asset pool according to Forbes. Further still, active ownership among passive fund managers is also on the rise, championed by the 'Big Three' passive managers.

Visit any investment manager's website and read their ESG strategy/policy. The foundation of any ESG strategy is to engage with companies on a broader range of topics than just financial performance. And its not just your investors. Your US counterparts have realised this. In August 2019 the Business Roundtable, that speaks for the American corporation, changed the purpose of a company from serving stockholders to serving stakeholders. Add to this the regulatory disruption caused by Mifid II and investors (plus staff, customers, suppliers and debt holders) are more interested in dealing directly with you on a broader range of topics. Forum 360 enables you to manage those incoming enquiries in to meetings with the relevant people from your organisation from the convenience of their office.

Changing Engagement Preferences: Regularly we hear that nothing beats a face to face meeting. And we agree. Our argument is that you cannot scale that experience nor can you meet frequently enough face to face with your key stakeholders. One important lesson we have learned over the last two years is that changing engagement preferences apply to your largest institutional investors as well. At Forum 360, we are working with portfolio management teams on engagement with their stakeholders (advisers and investors). Among our earliest adopters are fund managers with institutional mandates. Their clients are in the hundreds, not the thousands. Those clients are located around the world and they now have the opportunity to engage frequently in fireside chats with their portfolio managers. These portfolio managers invest in companies around the world and would like to see their portfolio companies offer engagement using the Forum 360 solution. Particularly for portfolio managers who have an ESG bias to their mandate as they want to be seen as ESG advocates and reduce the amount of travel they do. They still have the opportunity to set the agenda with their portfolio companies and talk about what they want to discuss and to do so much more frequently than offered prior. Since management quality is a factor in the vast majority of active manager investment criteria, then regular access to you leads to stronger conviction in their investment thesis.

In Part 3 of this series we will focus on the importance of measurement and how every group meeting, every audio-conference call, webcast and webinar is a missed opportunity to measure the strength of your relationships with your stakeholders when compared to Forum 360's solution. Stay tuned....