When Zillow Group won the best financial reporting award at the IR Magazine Awards – US 2018, it was partly in recognition of the IR team’s willingness to experiment with new technologies and ideas.
Best financial reporting was one of five awards-by-nomination categories, meaning that a judging panel determined the winner from shortlisted companies. The judges praised Zillow Group for its focus on defining what it wants to achieve with financial reporting and then identifying new ways to do it.
IR Magazine has previously written about the IR team’s use of a tool called Slido to manage the Q&A portion of the earnings call. Slido allows individuals to ask questions anonymously and then for other attendees to vote for which questions they would like management to answer. But another aspect that stood out was the use of survey tools to prepare for earnings.
Speaking to IR Magazine on the red carpet at the awards, Dennis Walsh, director of investor relations, explained that he uses an online survey tool to ask for anonymous feedback on what both the buy side and sell side would like to hear about on the next earnings call.
‘We’re collecting a lot of information that not only helps us to form the messages that we’re going to share on an earnings call, but also helps to prepare management for particularly tough questions that they might get,’ Walsh said. ‘Maybe there’s an unforeseen topic that the investment community is really concerned about that we might not have thought about on our own.’
Click here to watch the full video interview.
