Safaricom is a big, big company but it has a mediocre investor relations website. I have provided a few constructive suggestions on how to improve the website and shareholder communications below:-
SMS. Have an SMS registration module online and undertake to SMS the availability of material information being posted on your website as soon as it is released. This, critically, would be used to tell shareholders that their shareholder voting material is available online. Mobile penetration rates are high enough to ensure that the immediate, broad and nonexclusionary news of Safaricom’s corporate actions are made.
Focus on delivery of shareholder proxy material. Shareholders in any organisation should not have to actively seek out their shareholder proxy material. More importantly Safaricom should make use of all available media to keep its shareholders informed.
Optimise the Safaricom IR section for mobile. Mobile penetration is significant in Kenya and the ability to take the alert above to the website is significant.
Publish the annual reports in Scribd. It’s free! Plus investors don’t have to download the annual reports in order to read them. Plus the content is searcheable.
Publish investor presentations in slideshare. It’s free!! Plus the content is viewable immediately instead of having to download the file.
Use “push technology” to send out corporate news and information. Dealing with hundreds of thousands of shareholders is an opportunity to showcase the Safaricom brand
Use online charting. Use the sample here as a guideline and put major corporate actions on the chart. The software to do this is free.
RSS enable the website. RSS means real simple syndication. Its real simple and its effective.
Don’t put a direct link to viewing the presentation online in PDF. The full year 2010 presentation is 29 megabytes. Accessing this is obstructive as it downloads the presentation first before you view it. Enable investor choice to view the document online in scribd or similar software or to download it.
Optimise PDF downloads. A presentation that takes up 29 megabytes can be reduced to less than 2 megabytes by using the Adobe Acrobat optimise function.
Make PDFs word searcheable. Dont save PDFs in images when they contain narrative text. Ensure that they are word searcheable for the convenience of investors.
Use push technology to offer investors a menu of alerts. Automated solutions can be found so management’s valuable time need not be disturbed.
View Safaricoms annual report here in iPaper
Go to the iPaper website here
View African Telcos annual reports here