Canadian IR professional and multi-award winner Janet Craig is a judge for both the IR Impact Awards – Canada and the IR Impact Awards – Greater China
As we gear up for the IR Impact Awards in both South East Asia and Greater China, our teams of expert judges have been sifting through the many entries from companies talking about everything from how they have implemented AI into their programs to the memorable investor events they’ve put on for analysts.
IR Impact catches up with Janet Craig – herself a multiple IR Impact Award winner and now a judge for our events – to find out what marks an entry out as special.
Winners will be revealed on December 4, in Hong Kong at the IR Impact Forum & Awards – Greater China. Click here to book your place.
When you’re judging the IR Impact Awards, what are you looking for? Can you put it in a nutshell for us?
It’s really two things. One is, frankly, a submission that shows me what the results of these efforts are, why it’s something different and why it should win.
It has to be more than simply sharing your ESG report for example. I still read it but I want to know why I’m reading this.
Beyond that, I’m looking for something that really moves the needle in an impactful way. I’ve been in IR for a long time and I know there are only so many tools in your kit, so it’s not necessarily about coming up with a brand-new thing. But to share an example from the Greater China judging of something that really impressed, one company had an investor sleep over. That is cool, it’s memorable and it’s not easy to pull off.
There were other great examples around supply chain demos or investor bus tours that I think were interesting too. And I think about things that I did during my career that stay in mind as being impactful for investors. When I was at Nexen – a large energy company with global assets – we brought 10 or 12 investors to our biggest operation in the North Sea. Investors were concerned that the platform kept going down – and it was responsible for a significant portion of our cash flow. So we wanted people to see it and understand how sophisticated it was. But more than that, it was a bonding experience. No one is going to forget taking a helicopter in that survival suit and being on an oil platform. That is great for your relationship and it really makes a difference: it moves the needle. But it’s not necessarily innovative, because there are only so many things you can make innovative.
Going back to the judging, I’d love to see a stronger line in terms of why ‘it’ mattered, why it was the best.
That’s an interesting point. Some entries include a lot of statistics and other metrics, while others don’t. Does that matter?
I think the quantification matters – though it may not be about the numbers. For example, one of the tests of a really good investor day is if the messages and the themes carry through the analyst notes and questions – and which then get built on throughout the year. That isn’t necessarily something where you can say five out of seven analysts wrote on the messaging, but you could show how that story is being built, or how that message is landing.
It’s cool, it’s memorable and it’s not easy to pull off
What about judging the new IR Impact category? We have some entries where they’ve dealt with a crisis and others where it’s much more about good, solid day-to-day IR. How do you judge that?
The impact of investor relations can be about either of those things. For me, it is about asking What problem are you trying to solve? Depending on where the company is at, IR might do 80 percent of the meetings, because they have that credibility and that impact.
When it’s about a crisis, I want to see where and how IR was making that impact, because in some cases, it’s got nothing to do with IR and everything to do with the what the company has going on elsewhere.
When I was at Maple Leaf, I had to speak to investors on the bread price-fixing scandal, where another industry participant settled for half a billion dollars. Testing for the risk associated with those settlements was fairly high, and you had to get people from legal and elsewhere involved – people that generally don’t like speaking to the Street at all. My point is just how different one crisis can be from another when it comes to IR involvement – and impact. As judges, we really need that detail.
My last question: you’re now one of our cohort of international judges. How different is it being on the Canada panel versus Greater China, for example?
It was really different. I really had to keep testing myself. And Jeannie [Ong] was so helpful, because when I read some of the submissions for Greater China, I didn’t always have that local context. What I might see as normal IR, might very different dynamic. In Greater China, there are all these platforms that companies are using to communicate with shareholders; there’s A shares and H shares – it’s a very different environment. Understanding that and understanding the problems they were trying to solve and how they were solving them was really interesting. It’s also great to see that, as you go through different geographies, you still have the same IR goal.
Winners will be revealed on December 4, in Hong Kong at the IR Impact Forum & Awards – Greater China. Click here to book your place.
