If your employees are not living the organisation’s brand values internally then it’s going to be next to impossible to build the brand externally.
It’s surprising how much money and effort organisations put into building and promoting external brands when things just aren’t right on the inside. When culture is fragmented across different areas of the business. When employees just don’t have a clear view of the road ahead or who’s driving the organisation. When employee disengagement starts to spread because the organisation forgot how to challenge or reward them. When recruitment campaigns fail to get a result. When sales volumes start to dip because enthusiasm and belief for the organisation’s products and services just aren’t there any more. When change moves employees out of their traditional comfort zones and brings on stress and discomfort. When efforts to communicate with employees fall on deaf ears.
Organisations are switched on these days to identifying the warning signs but tend to experience significant difficulty when it comes to finding solutions.
Most branding consultants are inexperienced when it comes to thinking strategically and creatively to identify employee-related issues and finding ways to prescribe solutions – ones which, in many cases, significantly affect the future wellbeing of the organisation. Consulting firms tend to focus on business processes and the bottom line. Employer branding consultants like Heywood Innovation however, focus on employee-related issues and opportunities and how the organisation is perceived as a competent and attractive employer from both the inside and the outside.
The world is moving online and so are investors.
You’ve decided to transition your communications online and wind down the old print versions.
Online annual reports, sustainability reports, websites, e-newsletters and much more.
Makes sense.
There may even be some cost efficiencies!
You meet with your design agency who hand over their fees estimate.
You hit the roof and disbelief sets in.
Sound familiar?
Enter Heywood Innovation.
One of the most experienced online communications teams.
High value and industry leading results.
Ten reasons why you should be moving your printed communications online.
1 Print can be expensive – mailing certainly is.
2 Online can be a more compelling experience – video, animation etc.
3 Tablets and smartphones are outselling PCs this year – notice the trend.
4 People want their communications right here, right now – not next week.
5 Stick with print and they may perceive you as a stick-in-the-mud company.
6 Your print design team will try and hold you back – their jobs are at stake.
7 Your competitors are probably already moving there – with your customers.
8 There are cost efficiencies we can identify for you – smaller budgets, bigger results.
9 You’ll get to know who is reading your communications – and what they’re reading.
10 Online communications can be produced quickly – a lot faster than printed ones.
MORNING STAR GOLD
In collaboration with Steve Levett, a well respected Australian video director, we conceived and planned a corporate video for Australian mining company Morning Star Gold. The video tells the story of the re-birth of the Morning Star mine, once Australia’s premier gold mine located in the alpine region of NE Victoria. In 1861 gold was first discovered near where Woods Point is now located, which sparked another gold rush hot on the heels of the earlier one in the Bendigo-Ballarat area of Victoria. The video traces the history of the mine and celebrates the efforts of the present owner Morning Star Gold which is producing gold from the mine for the first time since 1962. The production included on ground and below ground video shoots and an aerial sequence.
There’s much debate in investor relations circles these days surrounding the topic of annual reports and the relevant benefits of print and online. Printed reports can certainly have a reassuring tactile quality and it’s true that their imminent demise has been exaggerated.
The debate however has moved on. There is a consensus that online is rapidly becoming the prevailing delivery platform for a number of compelling reasons:
> it is commercially attractive from a distribution perspective (no more printing, envelopes, mailing house costs, postage);
> it is appealing from an environmental viewpoint (no need to deplete the forests);
> online is a more engaging format that can provide an enhanced experience for shareholders, whether it’s using video, interactive elements or providing information in useful formats such as Excel and XBRL.
These formats provide a depth of information that can easily be imported into analytical tools so that a company’s yearly results and performance can be meticulously measured against the same company’s previous years’ performance as well as against competitor companies.
But that’s just the beginning of the argument in support of online. The next part of the story centres around which online format is important to shareholders. As we become more nomadic in our everyday lives and the boundary between work and life fades, there is a rapid shift away from desktop towards adoption of mobile technology – netbooks, tablets and smartphones. This is confirmed by predictions that the combined sales of tablets and smartphones in 2011 will exceed those of PCs. We believe that these devices will play an increasingly important role in providing the next big communications platform for online annual reports.
Heywood Innovation was the first company in Australia to embrace online annual reporting over ten years ago, and our focus on the UK and Australian markets is now encompassing the design and delivery of online reports for portable devices, including iPad, iPhone, Android tablets and smartphones, in addition to the more conventional online formats.
We invite you to view some of our latest projects at www.heywood.com.au
If you had any doubts about the accelerating shift from print to online consumption of information, above are a few snippets of information in support of the argument. The team here at Heywood Innovation have had a determined focus on the new opportunities that have opened up in the online space, particularly in the investor communications area, ever since we pioneered the introduction of online annual reporting here in Australia in 2001. It seems the days of the traditional PC are numbered, a casualty of the associated technology shift to a more convenient mobile model. The future is tablet shaped and sized. We look forward to constantly degreasing our finger tips and de-streaking (new tablet terminology) our tablet screens.
Here are a few choice statements that have motivated the team here recently and which seem very pertinent to the challenges and opportunities we perceive for 2010…
“The man who starts out going nowhere generally gets there”.
Dale Carnegie
“If we are to achieve results never before accomplished, we must expect to employ methods never before attempted”.
F Bacon
“Wherever you see a successful business, someone has made a courageous decision”.
Peter Drucker
“Management is doing things right. Leadership is doing the right thing”.
Peter Drucker
“It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change”.
Charles Darwin
“Imagination rules the world”.
Napoleon Bonaparte
“He who is not courageous to take risks in life will achieve nothing in life”.
Muhammad Ali
“If things seem under control, you are just not going fast enough”.
Mario Andretti
Tony Heywood is an international branding consultant and founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
Just in case you are still in the dark over what XBRL is, and how it will eventually change the way information is sourced from electronic documents…
Specific items of information in an electronic document such as an annual report are described and identified by XBRL tags. The tags are standardised, enabling data from multiple documents to be analysed and compared quickly and easily, even in different languages. This suggests even less reliance on paper-based annual reports and more interest in online HTML reports.
Analysts will get audited data in a consistent format which will take away much of the hard work. They will like it because it enables much deeper disclosure of reporting information.
Analyst take-up and adaptation of their internal processes relies on sector-specific national then global take up of XBRL. This requires of regulators from around the world the foresight to plan its introduction and collaborate on a wide scale. Until there is a wide base of XBRL formatted information out there, analysts do not presently have the incentive to take much notice and change their research activities to leverage XBRL benefits.
United Kingdom In March 2006 the UK government announced the use of XBRL for corporate tax returns and supporting accounts should be mandatory. From April 2011 all companies making a Company Tax Return must file their tax returns online using a specified XBRL data standard. This will require some determined planning on the part of these companies.
USA The SEC in the USA already have around 500 companies providing interactive data reports for fiscal periods ending on or after 15 June 2009. More will be doing the same over the next two years.
Unusually, Singapore, India and China have a head start over the US.
PricewaterhouseCoopers has been at the forefront of XBRL development and have plentiful advice for companies on how companies should approach integrating XBRL into their reporting process. www.pwc.com/gx/en/xbrl/index.jhtml
So where does that leave our dwindling tree population? Though there is much pleasure to be gained from receiving a well designed and printed annual report to satisfy your investment decision – which will eventually be discarded or hopefully consigned to an appropriate paper recycling resource – there comes a point where we have to ask ourselves as we drive around in our new hybrid vehicles “why are we consuming vast amounts of energy and resources to produce something which is also available online in a more information rich and accessible format?”
In the words of Al Gore… “The climate crisis… is our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level”.
Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia with affiliates in Melbourne, Gold Coast, London, Singapore and Mumbai.
I know we’ve had (note past tense) a recession, but now it’s all looking good (at least for the next two weeks according to various journos in that esteemed business newspaper the Financial Review) and we can start planning a bright new future.
The trees in Australia didn’t get too much of a reprieve this year, despite my efforts, as there still seems to be an abundance of paper-based June year end annual reports about to be printed in the next couple of months. The printers around town however will still cry poor. Quantities are down and the digital printers are massing at the gate. The writing is on the wall for ink on paper.
Onward and upward with online and HTML. So where does your company stand in the online reporting stakes? What investment has it made in its most expensive and important investor communication of the year? Yes I know there are many excuses that are trotted out in response to this question – We’re not ready for it yet. We’re too small. We got hit badly by the recession. We don’t have the time. Our shareholder base is too old to appreciate this type of thing. Our IT guy looked into it and said it wasn’t worth his time getting involved. It’s too expensive. An insufficient number of our shareholders have access to broadband. Our company secretary’s brother owns a printing company. You know what I mean.
It’s no understatement to say that the majority of companies are approaching it in a gradual way. Read that as slow. The easy way out for companies courtesy of an ‘interactive PDF/html’ version has slowed progress and diverted companies from seeking best practice. In fact there is a strong argument that an ‘interactive PDF/html’ version may be counter productive as it does not provide a great experience for the investor, who may just be tempted to revert to the printed version. Also, I haven’t met up with too many companies who seem overly bothered about whether their competitors are doing something better than they are. Oh well.
The reported take up of online reporting by shareholders, whether in London or Sydney, is reported to be 80 percent. It is a concern however to read an article by Clare Harrison in IR Magazine where she states that only around 5 percent are ‘happy to receive the annual report electronically’! I suppose it depends on how you interpret ‘happy’. But why only 5 percent? Does it really take this long to wean shareholders away from print and have them embrace the benefits of accessing reporting information online? I can only think that so many have been afflicted by the limited experience of PDF and ‘interactive PDF/html’ reports touted by many suppliers around the globe.
How long will it take for best practice html ‘mini website’ reports to gain majority approval? Any bets? What will it take to achieve this? How long will it take for printed annual reports to be reduced to black & white text-only documents for compliance and registration purposes? I got my hands on the 2008 Apple annual report (Form 10-K) recently – all 102 pages of it – all black & white, text only, on rather thin bond paper with a couple of big staples through it. The way of the future?
The html report, just like a website, offers considerable scope for almost unlimited functionality and the ability to customise to specific requirements – graph building tools, charting, print baskets, videos, podcasts – all of which enhance the user experience and leave the expensive days of print far behind.
I raised the new opportunities afforded by XBRL more than a year ago to many companies in Sydney. I have also included details on our website and in blogs, but to date have not received a single enquiry. The benefits are reportedly substantial, where specific items of data are ‘tagged’ for recognition, thereby enabling investors, analysts, accountants, auditors etc to find, compare and analyse data faster and more efficiently. By rights it should enable essential people like accountants to do their jobs faster, thereby saving clients money – but where have we heard that before?
At the end of the day money rules. If only someone could produce an html online report for the price of those nasty ‘interactive PDF/html’ versions. If you’re in London check out report-axs.co.uk and speak with Paul Sillers. In Sydney check out report-axs.com and speak with me. If you’re unfortunate enough not to live in these two highly desirable locations speak to me anyway as we don’t even need a face-to-face meeting to get results you may have only dreamed of. Until now.
Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.
Manufacturing 26 sheets of A4-size paper emits the same amount of greenhouse gas as driving a car one kilometre. Source: Clean Up Australia
One tree is used to produce 100 copies of an average (83 page) annual report. Source: Chartered Secretaries Australia
More water is consumed to produce one tonne of paper than any other commodity.
One litre of water is used to produce seven sheets of A4-size paper.
It takes 13.5 Gj of energy to produce one tonne of paper – this is equivalent to using 552 litres of heavy crude oil.
Tony Heywood is a Fellow of the Design Institute of Australia, founder of Heywood Innovation in Sydney Australia and joint founder of BrandSynergy in Singapore.
