May 28, 2010
Participant Questions and Comments
What services are needed to conduct a meeting with electronic participation? Several corporate managers have asked about the technologies and services needed for electronic participation in a shareholders meeting. This, of course, will vary depending on your investor communication objectives (the subject of the next question, below) and your legal and administrative requirements (which will be addressed in the report of a special project workshop established a few weeks ago.) For the simplest process that satisfies compliance requirements, we’ve observed companies such as Warner Communications arrange online shareholder voting and questions at less than the costs of transportation and accommodation for a few board members. From there, as demonstrated by other examples we’ve observed, such as the previously reported meetings of American Water and Intel as well as today’s report on NVIDIA, you can add things like slides, video, two-way voice or video-conferencing, and a variety of pre-meeting communications such as investor surveys or business presentations. If you tell us what interests you, specifically, we’ll try to get the answers for you.
What are the investor communication objectives? Both corporate managers and investors need to consider the specific objectives of meeting-related communications on a company-by-company basis. But it’s clear that there are also some broadly applicable objectives, such as providing shareholders with an opportunity to ask questions and observe responses. Understanding both the broad objectives and the range of specific ones will be critical to determining the requirements for fairness in meeting-related communications. Please let us know if you have any suggestions about what should be on the list of objectives.
Examining bad examples to understand what’s needed:
As you probably noticed, we have been trying to select examples of responsible, effective meetings to learn what works. Several Forum participants have offered examples of bad meeting practices, wisely advising that it’s just as important to learn what doesn’t work. Also, admittedly, it’s often a lot more entertaining. Here’s a story, in both print and video – whether a company uses video or not, the media does – that makes the point. So sure, give us more examples of how not to win the support of investors.
Although there were no Forum distributions of news reports relating specifically to meetings being observed for this program, there was an interesting report of a Chicago “gadfly” investor’s views of the local shareholder meetings he’s been attending for 50 years. Its humorous review of food and swag aside, the article provides useful observations about valid shareholder interests.
The May 19 meeting of NVIDIA Corporation, to which we’d referred briefly last week, is described in this week’s Focus Report, below.
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Avital Louria Hahn E-Meetings Review, a Shareholder Forum project 516-782-2715 avital.hahn@shareholderforum.com
© 2010 The Shareholder Forum |
