Investor Relations (IR) is complex and tough. Any investor relations officer (IRO) could easily name several challenges they face every day. Many of the IR challenges include understanding the always changing landscape of market stability, when to increase or cut budgets, and regulation compliance. Sometimes the biggest challenge is communicating this data to investors and stakeholders.
To communicate the data, IROs are already using data visualization in different formats (PowerPoint, Tableau, Infographics), but struggle with clearly conveying the data to prevent confusion and misunderstanding.
We understand that using data visualization is key to investor buy-in, so here are 3 ways IROs can improve their data visualization:
- Layout a roadmap of the most important datasets that investors and stakeholders need to make decisions. Wrong or inconsistent data could paint a false forecast and result in a sting of death for the investors. The roadmap provides consistency and stability.
- Consider using a custom data visualization dashboard that pulls and visualizes real-time datasets in a way that makes most sense. Using the same data visualization (e.g. a pie chart) for all datasets can create confusion. Some datasets are more impactful and relatable as a heatmap, and another dataset may be better received as a radar chart. A real-time dashboard gives you the freedom to visualize with clarity— it will consistently, accurately, and effectively tell the data story enabling the investors and stakeholders to make better decisions.
- Don’t over complicate the data visualization. Too much data can increase frustration, confusion, and lead to correlating points that really have no relevance to each other resulting in badly made decisions. Having a roadmap and dashboard will keep you accountable to the end goal and prevent the urge to add a new visualizations because you saw it on another presentation; or, adding a new dataset because it looked interesting, but in the end, is not relevant to the current goals.
Data visualization is fascinating, and when done correctly, can be a major communication asset for investor relations officers. Feel free to contact us with questions about data visualization and how you can use it to improve your investor relations.
Let’s start the conversation about investor relations and data visualization today.