Cameco wanted to reach investors, their key audience, through a website designed specifically to meet the information needs of investors. They first came to zu for help in 1995. Recently, Cameco has drawn more top-ranking IR awards. How did they come to be the industry leaders they are today?

All along, Cameco has been committed to making their story easy to understand. They have been willing to create new best practices and are unwilling to copy other companies, who often just mirror their competitors. And because Cameco is so open to new ideas, they inspire those they work with to go above and beyond.

When Cameco identified investors as their primary web audience, they began asking them more targeted questions though their annual perception studies. This helped determine what their investors wanted to see on an IR website. Cameco also recognized that investors would want to understand the basics of their business before they would be comfortable making investment decisions. And, when it came time to ask about company performance, Cameco knew that well-informed investors ask better questions.

When it was launched in December 2008, the redesigned website was strategically reorganized to enhance the flow of information to stakeholders. zu provided a spectrum of skills based on technological innovation, IR experience, design prowess, attentive service and programming expertise. Above all, an overall strategy gave structure and meaning to the new content and architecture. An expansive site design accommodated a wealth of reference materials that included multimedia, financial tables, dynamic charts, and other features, such as:

• Regularly updated CEO messaging, including CEO’s Corner (Q&A feature)
• Updated webcast and audio recordings
• Consistently fresh and relevant site content
• Tools that allows users to easily find historical market and company information
• A library to access documents in one location
• Information architecture focused on usability and easy navigation
• Enhanced environmental assessment content, highlighting:
• 23 key performance indicators
• Topic scorecards, with expandable and contractible information
• Information categorized by workplace, environment, communities and financial performance

Although the goal wasn’t to win awards, that was the result. The goal had been to make the site as useful and usable as possible to the primary target audience—investors—and this goal was achieved. In the annual IR Global Rankings alone Cameco has most recently been awarded:

• Best IR Website in North America (2010)
• Top 5 Ranked IR Website in North America (2009)
• Best Online Annual Report in North America (2008)
• Best IR Website by technical criteria in North America (2008)
• Best IR Website by technical criteria in Canada (2008)

But there will always be that little, annoying voice in everyone’s head that whispers doubts and disbelief about every company’s potential for growth. Call it due diligence, corporate distrust, or fear of the unknown, but this voice serves as IROs’ nemesis, chipping away at all the work they’ve put into promoting their company as the ultimate deliverer of shareholder value.

Yet, is the effort enough? More specifically, is the online story that companies are telling an open book, with all elements present to powerfully draw in investors so they not only believe the company’s story but want to tell others?

For it to resonate with your audience, your story needs to be easily accessible, understood and true. Ask yourself, your IR department, and the investors who visit your website:

-Does your website require visitor information prior to giving access? (The equivalent to a salesperson asking me to provide my personal information before I can browse a store for shoes)
-Does it hide the good stuff in PDFs?
-Does it only speak to the past, rather than also proactively discussing the future?

If the answer to these questions is yes, revisions are in order.

Consider Canada’s current place in the world economy. Relatively sheltered from the global recession, Canada is slowly but surely recovering. And so, Canadian companies are positioned to capitalize on this major opportunity once the country recovers and people regain confidence in the markets. But companies need to prepare now for when that time comes, when investors will flood the markets seeking best value, trusting in stories that clearly tell them how they will earn that value. Pen your online tale properly now so that you can be ready to draw these investors in and create believers out of them.

Presuming you do cover these topics somewhere, will our intrepid investor find what you are providing? How hard will this task be for him? Is your website effective in informing, or does it make it a challenge? If it is a challenge, well… why are you allowing it to be a challenge?

It seems IRO’s usually strive for communication effectiveness in ways suitable to the form they are delivering meesages in:

-    for required filings and releases effectiveness is in accurate reporting, a transparent writing style, and balanced treatment of opportunities and challenges;

-    in presentations they shoot for nicely designed PowerPoint slides, hopefully with legibly-sized type and some consistency in visual style;

-    in speech delivery or one-on-ones they practice-up the executives for an engaging and credible delivery.

Yet investor sections of corporate websites are not getting the idea of “effectiveness”. They may be getting the idea of ‘completeness’, but they are just not getting the ‘Internet’ part.

Not many of your favorite websites would consider their efforts to engage their audience complete with the addition of a PDF. Frankly, I can’t think of any good (non-investor related) website that would trust key messages to only PDFs. Well, maybe government websites, but they’re not really in any sort of competition based on effectiveness. Oh, and they’re not trying to achieve a fully and fairly valued stockprice based on informed investors. Oh, and they’re not worried about their cost of capital.

So, back to the idea of considering whether you are communicating foundation material on your website effectively. Ask: “Why should someone who doesn’t know my company invest in it?” “Can my website answer basic questions that will engage them in our story?” “How difficult does my website make it to find these answers?”

Get your visitors, especially potential investors, off to a strong start when they visit your website. (Please Note: I didn’t say “When they visit your Filing Cabinet”).

Don’t make the task of evaluating your company more work then it has to be. Don’t make them convince themselves of your worthiness. Don’t make them play BattleDecks with your sans-remarks Investor Slideshow.

Get your content strategy together. If you’re interested in doing better talk to us at zu.

This screen capture from the I-Metrix brochure displays the concurrent presentation of financials for Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell generated from the XBRL feeds from Edgar Online. This type of tool will greatly accelerate the data gathering process for potential investors from hours to minutes.

Soon the ‘go-to’ description of your enterprise will become the equivalent of a food label nutrition chart in a ‘just the facts’ approach to providing information.

Here we can compare two brands of chocolate chip cookies.

But is this how we buy food? By only looking at these measurables? We all know that, despite the similar make-up of these products, they don’t taste the same and one will be more successful than the other.

The reasons for success may be better explained in the story that goes with the product then in the nutritional performance data.

When XBRL allows your company to be compared side-by-side with its peers in a generic GAAP-compliant view, such as those provided conveniently by I-Metrix, then what is the next step in the analysis? What’s missing?

What will increasingly matter on the Internet and on your website will be the ‘other stuff’, not the financial reporting. It will be the story the CEO tells investors in person. When he’s running the conversation he isn’t reading XBRL to the audience, he’s adding the context, the long-term strategy, and the positioning explaining markets, outlook, competitive advantage and so forth.

When the quantitative XBRL filtering and screening is over with, and the analyst or retail investor visits your website, are they going to get what’s missing? Or is it just out-of-date, coffee table book statements about the company with links to PDF financial reports that are rather superfluous to the slicing and dicing already done by XBRL readers?

Will they find current high-value materials provided in an engaging way? Will they see the clarity in the plan that fosters a corporate culture that will win in their chosen field and create shareholder value? Will it bring to life the recipe that makes a company a success?

When widely disemminated XBRL viewers focus attention on your last quarter’s earnings blips, are you ready to show an engaging version of why your company is a worthy investment?

Even as we integrate new communication forms and technologies, let’s keep our eye on the website.

Anyways, it turns out the most successful companies deliver an “experience”, in addition to whatever else they are doing. (So please take that as a given or go to the MX conference for yourself). The main dividing point in how brands or companies deliver an experience to their clients is whether it is delivered in a ‘prescriptive’ way or in an ‘adaptive’ way. The former is how Disneyland presents their experience of ‘Magic’: “come here and we do it to you”. On the other end of the scale is Harley Davidson: “Buy this and become a modern day rebel” (instructions not included).

Now, many investors, especially more advanced ones, have a planned experience in mind when they hit your site. With mathematical formulas and ratios set to plug in your numbers, these investors use an adaptive approach to create their own experience using materials you passively provide. Most websites will support this type of experience by default with their filing cabinet of materials.

But can your website provide a ‘prescriptive’ experience? Is your website empathetic enough to less prepared visitors to consider how the parts go together to tell a story? Do you provide instructions and strategy to relate the various departments, performance measures, and operations into a cohesive whole? Or will your site come off as a poorly coordinated set of activities and assets, a somehow-successful holding company communicating little sense of priority, direction or focus to the whole enterprise. While the evidence is there, the vision that unites the actions will rarely be realized by chance without empathy for the naiveté of first time visitors. And everyone who owns you was once a first time investor.

While the big picture view may be found in areas of investor relations ‘magic’, such as a CEO’s speech, the greater whole is an unscripted landscape, good for adaptable experiences and poor for the uninitiated.

I’m thinking of an investor-oriented website as a new kind of taco bar, where all the ingredients are laid out, each in their little bowls and serving dishes; it might be delicious, but I’m unsure how to put it together. How does this work? How do other people do this? What is the key to understanding this? I might be fine after I get through it the first time, but I frankly need some prescriptive advice to get the most out of what is being offered.

So please feel empathy toward your first time potential investors, and make sure they enjoy themselves and don’t feel like goofs trying to figure out why you’re worthwhile eating, I mean buying.

For starters,  communicators should respect the new ways audiences interact and meet them on their own terms. And frankly, most companies that put Social Media in such high regard is really questionable, given their handling of Web 1.0.

Remember that one? Publishing good content in HTML?

A good example of these forgotten basics in the Investor Relations world is the handling of annual reports online. Even though this is the Internet, where folks like to use their browsers to read, search, enlarge, bookmark, copy and paste, enjoy rich media, interactive elements, light boxes, related information–many companies are deciding that the LEAST they can do in meeting the expectations of their online audience is the right choice, and so provide only lifeless PDFs or freakish custom viewers designed by print publishing houses.

Perhaps social media is the answer! Perhaps all will be made well by Twittering about a recent posting of some required filing in PDF format, or blogging about their uninspiring filing-cabinet-of-a-website. “Web 1.0 is dead! Long live social media!”

Excuse me if skip the parade, I have to get back to working on Web 1.0.

twitpitch: Get back to basics of Web 1.0 before you invest in social media.@zutweets @tonyzuck shares insights for publishing good #IR content online.

At first the IR lingo whizzed past my head like speeding bullets: 10K, the Wrapper, Annual Review, SEC regulations, XBRL, and stock quotes. More and more details from legal, Investor Relations and corporate branding would come pouring in. These documents are not to be taken lightly, nor the team involved. Every collaborator deals with extreme pressure to perform and deliver a report better than the last.

The annual report is a magnificent piece, articulately composed like a symphony. Every number, every note, every photo, every letter, every sentence, every punctuation mark is reviewed over and over until it is perfect. Only to be witnessed for the first time at opening night.

But time again the grand performance ends for me, abruptly. I want the show to continue the symphony on my player, the Internet. When I am presented with only one fomat—a PDF print format—I don’t want to download anything. I want both. I want to witness it now, not later. I want to search and bookmark float from Financials to MD&A in any order I wish. Does this seem like a wild request for navigating an annual report—online?

Annual reports converted into online masterpiece are sometimes perceived as a luxury item. But based on best practices online annual reports are no longer a luxury, they are a standard. You might be surprised how affordable an entry-level model can be.

At our upcoming webinar on September 24th, I’m going to present online options every Investor can consider by breaking it down into small, medium and large budget categories. In the meantime, I would like to get your feedback about your experiences with online annual reports. Please post your comments in this blog or you can reach me on twitter @katregnier.

Register for our webcast.

twitpitch: Convert your #annualreport into an online symphony. @zutweets @katregnier shares IR insights http://bit.ly/1eaBZW

Ryan Lejbak will engage in a brief discussion on utilizing social media to augment your current communications plan without costs and with limited time investment.

Register for the  webcast replay.

Over the past few years, we have watched (and assisted) PotashCorp switch from a “Print First” to “Web First” strategy for their often award-winning materials. And the 2008 report titled, “More per acre… the sustainable solution“, was conceived and designed first as an online document. A PDF summary is also offered for those with money to burn on inkjet cartridges, or Kindles.

The sustainability report, including historical data was built around Global Reporting Initiative recommendations. It uses the same programming standards found in their online annual report and so opens in its own microsite—just how website users like it and how this premium web content oughta be.

Of course, not many companies tell the company story, or describe their plans for the future, or describe their sustainability efforts, better. And that makes the web presentation so much stronger.

Congrats to all involved on this one!

During the #NIRI09 Conference, I attended a panel discussion that focused on XBRL strategies and the changing role of IROs. The panel included XBRL experts Michael Becker and Mike Willis.

Why is XBRL Relevant?

I learned from our panelists that XBRL is a business language that facilitates communication standardization. The current conditions often involve third party intermediaries that take your information, modify it, parse it, and/or reorganize it that is then distributed in a different form from the original. It can end up being inaccurate or presented in a way that can be misinterpreted.

XBRL prevents the modification of information by standardizing the way it is labelled regardless of naming conventions or nomenclature a company may use to describe things on the front-end in their financial reports. In addition, it mitigates effort to compile and review information since it’s already in a standardized format from the get-go.

What is Required? The SEC XBRL Mandate requires submission of XBRL formatted statements via an “XBRL exhibit” for annual, quarterly, and registration statements and is required to remain on the website for at least 12 months.

RSS feeds can be used to lower distribution costs and burden (SEC site and IR site). Allows users to pull the data and use it for their own analysis.

What is it? “Bar Code” for business information. Computer code that can be rendered and displayed to include a label, presentation, definitions, calculations, contexts, formulas, references, and taxonomy.

What is in it for an IRO? A Streamlined Review Process. The laborious assembly and review process is mitigated. Ultimately, this reduces costs and time to produce financial reports. If the XBRL is implemented as close to the origin of information then more savings can be realized.

XBRL will allow IRO’s to communicate more relevant information to their constituents in a timely fashion. Summarized reviews can be accomplished using rendering tools and used by investors to configure and automate information to display the most important data to them.

Standardized formulas and rules in business rules will allow collaboration among investors/analysts so that models can be created to work across multiple periods across different companies. Such tools already exist like I-Metrix; this allows for comparisons and correlations in a simple way.

SUMMARY
> More effective communications
> Streamlined compliance processes
> Lower cost & more efficient documentation preparation
> Better insights via social analytics
> Explicit relationships between materials across sources

Granted, the larger and more multi-purposed the website, the greater the need for IT to control the rate of change of the site. And the greater the controls and project management needed to ensure website changes don’t endanger the integrity of the greater site. We understand their need to move cautiously, resist change and experimentation, and slow the path of new technologies. (Such as corporate adoption of browsers newer then IE6, access to social media sites, etc.)

We’ve found IROs who actually need our help in dealing with/working with their own IT department to make substantive changes to their sites, such as improving information architecture and the addition of usability enhancements. We are happy to do this – to be guides and project managers for the IROs with their own information services group. And after gaining the trust of the technology folks, we are actually appreciated in helping them deliver a project on time. It is reasonable to expect that a temporary boost in web programming capability is what a project needs to actually be accomplished, as corporate IT departments are typically overbooked with projects at any point in time.

Of course, the best strategy is that the IR website be removed from the enterprise solution (while maintaining the online brand) so that Investor Relations can have much closer and immediate control of their website. Just because the website is “programming-oriented” does not mean it should be controlled by IT. The IR website is a communication project, like the annual report. Imagine if IT controlled the means of producing that.

In most cases, and especially where the website has many purposes beyond the Investor Relations function, IR websites would be far better if IT was out of the loop.

Most feel having information available on the site in a PDF form is good enough. IROs point to the screen and say, “See it’s right there”. If you were to think of your website as a lobby, and these files are in the filing cabinets behind the desk, there is a very high chance nobody is going to find them, nor do they want to waste their time looking.

Companies can create a great experience online, they just need to have a better understanding of what investors are looking for. Implementing best practices into a web-friendly experience can go a long way.

Here’s a few simple yet highly overlooked practices that you can implement at a low cost and will create a clear vision for your website users.

• Look at all your company materials, select important content, then develop it into web content. The best information is often buried and it’s your job to ensure it filters onto your website. Visitors are impatient so give them a hand.
• Ensure all your PDFs have the appropriate file names, so when downloaded they are easy to identify. Start with the company name then the file name, which should be descriptive. I have seen file names like this: 34293-3892774oiAR09.pdf. A good file name example is ABCComapany_AnnualReport09.pdf.
• The website should provide data and positioning material to address both prospective and current shareholders. Cameco is a good example of this.
• All links that prompt you to download an item should be clearly marked. Nothing is more frustrating then when you click on a link and bam… a PDF starts downloading.

It is rather tiresome to hear that there is “too much risk” in actually providing the text of what was said to investors. Text that is quite frankly necessary to make sense of the slides. How about the risk of annoying all of your investors who could not attend the event? Or, if the speech is only provided in audio, what about those with hearing disabilities?

If companies are afraid to provide the words that a key executive spoke in public, it makes me think that perhaps the person was drunk. Why else would the remarks be so unreliable that Legal believes they’re going to get in trouble for letting us read what was said? This is poor disclosure. Or laziness.

The owners deserve to hear what their executives said in public to other owners.

We’ve been exploring the ‘living’ annual report format and are dying to create one. In our minds a living OAR captures a ‘snapshot in time’ of the official filing but is then updated over the next several quarters to provide current key financials and current links to related information and updates.

A living online annual report takes advantage of the fact that many investors use the annual report as one of the first steps in their due diligence as a way to get up to speed on what your company is about. With this in mind, why not address the visitor’s obvious next question: “What happened next?”

Providing information in this convenient location dovetails with our mission to create Investor Friendly materials. For us this means simply anticipating the next question and the next piece of related information that a potential investor might want. This may include providing other website materials: press releases, links to product announcements, mining site profiles or whatever else is on the site that expands knowledge about this important topic.

Of course with financial results, the main question is: “What are the latest results?”

While the Annual Report is intended to be a snapshot in time, for 12 months it becomes an important introductory piece on your company. This effect is emphasized in companies with sub-par IR areas. If your IR site is a lame filing cabinet, then consider this idea more strongly. While printed annuals do have a certain shelf life (probably a month or two before being tossed in the bin) their lack of up-to-date information is no sin. Online Annual Reports (OARs) on the other hand, are important resources until they are replaced with the new version. “While OARs function as guides to your company they can’t answer any current questions — even obvious ones. They can’t even direct you to information about “what happened next”. We don’t think this is acceptable given that they could”.

Consider that the printed AR only reaches current shareholders. So the online version’s main target is potential shareholders. With this in mind, and understanding that this is a key source of information in their due diligence, an IRO’s question should be: “how can I help this potential shareholder more quickly reach their comfort zone of knowledge so they can invest?” Well, think about making the site Investor Friendly. Think about anticipating what you’d look for next. It’s not “Rocket Surgery” as Ricky says on Trailer Park Boys.

We are not suggesting that every element be updated. Apply it to key financial tables, key program descriptions in progress, key deals playing out at time of writing, etc. To preserve the ‘snapshot in time’ version we suggest the additional information be accessible via an “Update” button, for visitors to trigger the effect. What will their reaction be? I expect things like: “That’s handy!”, “What a smart company!”, “This makes it easier!”,“These folks understand technology”;“Hey this sucks way less than that other company’s materials!”

• Decreases printing costs
• Trains shareholders on the value of the website as a source of information
• Green (environmentally much friendlier than a print version)
• Respects Internet users
• Shows strong desire to serve the investor
• Communicates better (if embracing the best usability practices)
• Can make use of rich media (animation, interactivity, etc.) to demonstrate or explain complex information
• Can leverage the leadership power of a key executive
• Offers the potential for emotional impact via rich media
• Recognizes that the Annual Report is a reference material not just a required filing
• Provides printable options, such as PDF
• Provides analytic aids like interactive graphing of financial information, downloading of EXL files
• Decreases mailing costs (financially friendly)
• Goes beyond the 10-K with attractive presentation, summaries, emphasis on management’s key points
• Investor Friendly
• Provides another reason to come to the site for voting
• Can use decreased print budget as source of funds
• The generation with non-grey hair expects it (their hair will soon be grey too)
• May be the best part of your IR website
• May be the only part of your IR website that pulls together all of your goals and messages, so it should not be locked in a non-Internet format.

Others? Please suggest if you have any!