Awards research – Europe 2011

Underlying the IR Magazine Awards is a body of research that identifies the best corporate IR teams and provides a window into the thinking of IR’s most important audience. This survey is the only one of its kind to go directly to the investment community, via a combination of an electronic survey and one-to-one telephone interviews, canvassing the opinions of the people who matter to you most.

November/December 2010: The sample selection
IR magazine has been building investment community databases over the past 20 years. As part of the updating process, listed companies are contacted every year for details of the professionals who currently cover their stock. These data are then passed to Fox Insight of London, who conduct a preliminary electronic survey of buy-side and sell-side analysts and portfolio managers.

January/February 2011
The responses from the electronic survey go to Mary Maude Research, also of London, for preliminary analysis. The research firm then determines what will constitute a representative sample, weighted for Europe’s industry sectors and geographical regions, in line with the MSCI Pan-European Sector Weightings. Once the research is in progress, the sample is constantly adjusted to ensure appropriate weightings are maintained.

February-April: The survey
The telephone survey then gets under way. Around 500 in-depth, 15 to 20-minute telephone interviews are conducted with portfolio managers and analysts across Europe. Many of them participate in the study year after year, but there’s always a healthy proportion of new respondents each year as well.

Late April: Results analysis
Once the survey stage of the research is completed, the final analysis is completed. The companies with the highest point scores make the short lists for the awards categories, and the points are also analyzed by sector to identify which companies are the best exponents of IR in their industry.

The independence of our research is crucial to the integrity of the whole awards program, so IR magazine sees the results only once the research is complete. This ensures a transparent, independent set of results that IROs can trust as a valuable benchmarking tool.

May
Short list announced
IR magazine receives the results in late April and contacts all the short-listed companies to give them the good news. The short list is then published to the entire IR community a month before the event.

Corporate research
In preparation for the publication of the research both on our website (www.insideinvestorrelations.com) and in hard copy (the Investor Perception Study, Europe 2011), an additional phase is now launched, to try to improve our understanding of the reasons underlying the success of the top-rated IR programs and to provide context to the study. This phase involves a combination of desk research and interviews with IROs at short-listed companies. The latter are invited to discuss the special challenges they may have faced in the past year, or the changes made to their programs, budgets and staffing.

June 30
And finally... on the night of the awards, the names of the winners are revealed and they receive their coveted trophies at a black-tie gala dinner in London’s Hilton Park Lane.

July 1: Report published
The results and analysis, along with verbatim comments from respondents and the full rankings of the leading companies – in overall terms as well as by sector and by category of IR activity – are compiled into a report and published as the Investor Perception Study, Europe 2011 the day after the awards.

At the same time, the data from the report about companies named in the course of the research are incorporated into the research & data section of our website in an interactive form. Professional subscribers to the website have full access to the research data from regions covered (Europe, the US, Canada, Brazil, Asia) so can benchmark their performance against that of other companies worldwide.

To order your copy of the Investor Perception Study, Europe 2011 please contact Jonathan Cardle at +44 20 7107 2566.