As you prepare for your company’s Investor Day, one of the most powerful tools you can implement is an investor survey. Investor Day is one of the most valuable touch points a public company has with the investment community. It’s an opportunity to showcase long-term strategy, reinforce management credibility, and shape how current and potential shareholders understand the business.
But a successful Investor Day doesn’t start with the slide deck or the agenda — it starts with listening.
Before a company begins preparing for its Investor Day, conducting a structured investor survey is a critical step. The insights gathered can dramatically improve the event’s relevance, clarity, and impact.
Equally important is understanding who best to conduct, compile, and report the key takeaways from the survey to leadership?
IR professionals know all too well that when C-suite implements the survey using internal resources, it often receives overly polite or restrained feedback. Investors, especially long-only institutional holders, may hesitate to criticize management directly. Even on the sell-side, concerns about relationship optics can make responses softer than they would otherwise be.
At FastrackPR, our team brings years of experience developing, conducting, analyzing survey data and reporting the findings back to leadership.As your trusted IR consultants, we provide an added layer of quality assurance by delivering honest, unfiltered feedback.
By engaging with a trusted IR consultant to conduct the survey, you create an environment in which everyone can answer in earnest. Respondents trust that their names and comments won’t be attributed individually. This confidentiality encourages investors to be candid about concerns or areas of interest.
Partnering with trusted a IR consultant increases investor engagement, both before and during the event, and reduces the risk that investors leave the event saying, “That was interesting, but they didn’t address my real concerns.”
As trusted IR consultants, we act as a neutral party analyzing feedback objectively.
Synthesizing themes without internal bias means the final report will be actionable and reflect reality, not courtesy. Independently conducted surveys eliminates potential pressure on the internal IR team to deliver tough feedback and gives management assurance that they hear what they need to hear, not just what’s expected.
We have found that by letting us aggregate all feedback effectively and efficiently, it allows the in-house IRO to most effectively prioritize key topics (vs casting a wide and inefficient net). Use the survey results to guide company leadership to identify the top three to five areas of investor interest and structure the narrative so that it answers investor questions before they are even asked.
Plus, let’s face it, these surveys are time-consuming, and does the internal IR team really need one more major assignment on their already very full plates?
Stop | Listen | Learn
To ensure your Investor Day is a turning point and not a missed opportunity, ask investors what matters to them. The results can be input that builds trust, strengthens relationships, and signals mutual respect by demonstrating that management wants to engage in a dialogue.