Views
Virtual Shareholder Meetings Best Practices
Featuring a 10-Step Checklist for Successful VSMs
Virtual shareholder meetings (VSMs) became even more popular among issuers as a response to the pandemic. Now, these emergency measures are becoming a lasting feature of corporate governance. By mid-2024, after the pandemic, 70% of meetings were virtual or hybrid among S&P 1500 companies, Harvard reports.
As an issuer, your team can use VSMs as a strategic way to connect, engage, and govern more effectively. Proxymity can help you make the most of these opportunities. This article shares virtual shareholder meeting best practices, including how Proxymity transforms VSMs into real-time, connected experiences for proxy voting, governance transparency, and shareholder engagement.
The current VSM landscape
VSMs have transformed from pandemic-era solutions to strategic governance tools. Harvard found that virtual meetings rose from just 8.5% pre-COVID to 81% during the pandemic, settling at 70% among S&P 1500 companies. Amendments to articles of association allow most UK-listed companies to hold hybrid AGMs.
Key advantages of VSMs include:
1. Cost efficiency and global reach
2. Sustainability from reduced travel emissions
3. Transparency in shareholder communications
However, boards and investor relations teams continue to face challenges with security, accessibility, reliability, and compliance when administering VSMs.
Optimising virtual shareholder meetings: best practices for future-readiness
Pairing strong planning with the right tech can help issuers and issuer agents overcome these challenges and make virtual shareholder meetings far more impactful. This way, general meetings or VSMs aren’t just about managing logistics and operations; they’re a key opportunity to reinforce good governance. Let’s explore a few best practices to help streamline both logistics and governance.
Pre-meeting preparation: setting the stage
Successful VSMs begin long before the actual event. Early legal and compliance checks are essential, ensuring your meeting format aligns with corporate governance requirements, securities regulations, and jurisdictional mandates across markets.
However, many issuers overlook critical preparation gaps that undermine VSM effectiveness. Common oversights include failing to establish reliable real-time communication channels with intermediaries, inadequate testing of technology platforms under peak load conditions, and limited consideration of global accessibility requirements that exclude key shareholders.
How Proxymity can help
Proxymity Vote Connect addresses these preparation challenges by establishing reliable real-time communication channels with the entire custody chain. The platform’s cloud-native architecture ensures stable performance under peak load conditions. Built-in accessibility features and global market coverage eliminate shareholder exclusion risks from the start.
Engagement and communication: building connections
Effective VSMs require clear, multi-channel communication that reaches shareholders through their preferred channels. However, many organisations struggle with fragmented communication that fails to reach all participants effectively. Issuers often underestimate the complexity of coordinating across multiple time zones with consistent messaging. Both issuers and the intermediary lack visibility into shareholder sentiment before meetings begin. This results in missing proactive engagement opportunities.
Accessibility is critical for inclusive governance. Your communication plan should include traditional methods and digital platforms to ensure maximum participation. You must be prepared for providing translations, accounting for different time zones, accommodating varying technical proficiencies, and implementing WCAG compliance measures as well.
How Proxymity can help
Proxymity Vote Insights provides visibility into shareholder sentiment and voting patterns before meetings begin, enabling proactive and personalised engagement strategies. Proxymity Vote Connect eliminates fragmented communication by delivering your meeting details or proxy statements within 60 seconds for connected issuers, ensuring consistent messaging across markets.
Meeting execution: delivering a seamless experience
The virtual meeting itself must provide real-time connectivity, professional presentation capabilities, and technical support. Interactive elements such as live Q&A sessions, polls, and networking functionality can transform passive attendance into active engagement. These elements ensure smooth operations and help maintain credibility with participating shareholders.
A significant governance gap emerges during meeting execution when vote tracking lacks transparency and real-time visibility. Existing methods struggle with delayed vote confirmations, creating uncertainty among shareholders about whether votes have been properly recorded.
How Proxymity can help
Proxymity allows for real-time vote delivery and live vote tracking, ensuring transparency and confidence during and upon completion of the voting process. The platform provides instant vote confirmations, giving shareholders assurance that votes are recorded.
Post-meeting follow-ups: closing the loop
Effective governance continues after VSMs end. Timely publication of outcomes and minutes demonstrates transparency and keeps shareholders informed of decisions and their implications.
However, many issuers miss these opportunities. They also may struggle to analyse engagement patterns and voting behaviour after meetings conclude. Without proper data analysis, organisations cannot identify areas for improvement or understand factors that influence shareholder participation.
How Proxymity can help
Proxymity Vote Insights provides comprehensive post-meeting analytics on engagement patterns, voting behaviour, and shareholder sentiment. These detailed insights help you identify improvement opportunities, understand participation drivers, and refine future meeting strategies for enhanced governance outcomes.
Successful VSMs begin with Proxymity
Virtual shareholder meetings are more than a digital alternative to traditional meetings—they’re a corporate governance opportunity that emphasises transparency, efficiency, and engagement. By connecting all participants in real time, VSMs create opportunities for more inclusive and responsive governance.
At Proxymity, we believe every shareholder should have equal access to participate, regardless of their location or abilities. Let’s connect and explore how we can help your team deliver seamless, engaging VSMs. Contact one of our experts for more.