Recent IR Impact briefing examined the topic of winning investor confidence at a time when the capital markets are increasingly fragmented
Between the emergence of passive investment strategies, the uptake of pass-through voting and the dwindling influence of proxy advisors, investor engagement is an increasingly complex undertaking.
In response to these shifts, IR teams are looking into their investor base for deeper intelligence about what their shareholders are thinking, to get ahead of any unpleasant surprises that might be waiting around a particularly contentious vote or ahead of a big strategic shift.
This was the topic tackled by three IR experts – Danielle Collins, head of investor relations at Southwest Airlines, Mark Simms, head of investor intelligence at Computershare Investor Engagement, and Brandon Throop, vice president, corporate development and investor relations at Blossom Gold – at a recent IR Impact Briefing. They each shared their own learnings from investor engagement processes and gave their advice to IR teams who wanted to update their own practices for 2026.
Here are four things we learned during the event. To watch a full catch-up of the briefing, visit IR Impact’s home on Brighttalk here.
Where do you start?
Throop, who joined Blossom Gold earlier this year, shared the perspective of someone who has helped establish an investor engagement approach from a relatively early stage.
‘We just started trading in February, so it’s been a lot of drinking from the fire hose here,’ he revealed. ‘But I think the key thing to keep in mind is we had an AGM within a couple of months, and it’s sometimes hard to understand the voting. The point we try to take from it is that it’s a continuous process. If you get a negative vote on something, a lot of the time the stewardship teams – the investors – just want to be heard.’
For Throop’s team, it’s a matter of showing that they are taking action based on investor concerns and following up for future votes. It’s also a case of ‘not taking things personally’, he added. ‘It’s about knowing where the vote is, but also knowing the voices within those funds or groups who have the insight on AGM voting or proxy voting.’
Identifying your movers and shakers
A key part of keeping up with that sentiment is identifying the influencers within your shareholder base – those who will shift the opinions of other investors on a given issue. Collins said that she refers to these influential people as ‘movers and shakers, because that’s what my grandma would call them’.
She added: ‘These are individuals on the investor side who have their ear to the ground, and I’ve observed two different types. The first is the short-orientation mover and shaker, who’s in the gossip stream – going to all the conferences, they have Bloomberg chats up, constantly chatting. The second type is more the seasoned equity professional. They go to conferences, but they don’t approach other investors at different funds to talk, [though] the other investors approach them. If you go to a conference, they’re holding court: everyone wants to come up, hear their opinion, hear their perspective. They’re almost like the hairdresser, where everyone shares what they’re thinking and that person just listens.’
Identifying both of these profiles of ‘movers and shakers’ is key as they will alert you to sentiment shifts ahead of the numbers telling you the same – and ahead of other investors. Once identified, Collins and Throop agreed that keeping up with such shareholders is all about the bread and butter of good IR – honing those people skills and staying in touch.
Quantifying support
One of the thorniest parts of navigating this process is understanding the level of support for a company’s strategy. According to Simms, this is becoming increasingly difficult, particularly given the changing way investors vote and the varying influences they operate under.
‘It comes down to who actually controls the vote – who’s going to turn up at the AGM, or the AGM/EGM in a defense or activist situation, to support the company or not,’ he explained. ‘That means behavioral analysis: how they’ve voted in the past, what influence proxy advisers or internal governance teams have on them and whether they actually vote at all.’
Simms said that this allows IR teams to put a figure on that support level, whether that’s the proportion of a shareholder base who will support any vote, who are unlikely to because they arrived after a particular event, or who are somewhere between the two and require engagement to consolidate their backing. ‘That’s where the engagement comes in,’ he added. ‘Knowing who’s controlling these votes, what their policies are and what they’re likely to do.’
Beware your own Kool-Aid
The panelists also tackled the nature of feeding crucial engagement data back into their company – particularly the C-suite – and how to best present that information for consumption. For Collins, the key to making this feedback useful is to keep the presentation slimline, targeted and optimized.
‘Everyone has a tendency to drink their own Kool-Aid and to be really in love with their own jobs and the data that they have access to,’ she said, speaking about IROs who put together enormous slide decks. ‘It’s information overload because you want to prove how smart you are.’ Instead, Collins advised bearing in mind the key question of What am I trying to accomplish? Data dashboards are a great way to achieve this, but you need to incorporate analysis into any of that data-gathering, otherwise it could end up being less useful.
Throop agreed. ‘It’s about providing insight into why something happened: shareholders sold out of your company because they exited the sector, versus because they don’t like something you’re doing. Just knowing as much intel as possible and providing that to the management team: this is key.’
To watch a full replay of the briefing, click here.
