When the work on the current report is finished and the project for next year is already in preparation, the responsible departments start to consider which contents they should present to their stakeholders in a targeted way.
Usually some of these decisions are made based on standardised statistics. For example, page views and views are considered reliable data for content retrieval. Compared to their printed counterparts online reports fortunately provide these information. However, they don’t tell us, who the visitors actually are.
This is where the limitations of standardised statistics become notable. Companies know where and how often people visit sites, but they do not know who these visitors are or to which stakeholder group they belong. Information about the readers of corporate reports is terra incognita in these regards. Is an applicant interested in different content than an analyst? Is an employee looking for different content than a potential investor? How do you find out who belongs to which interest group?
If you want to get to know your visitors, you should ask them about themselves. Ideally a question that every visitor can relate to. For example:
“Which of these best describes you?“
With this question and a wide range of choices, we have developed a compact query feature. Based on this micro-survey companies can find out which group their visitors belong to. It is important that the general question complies with data protection.
Two of our customers who already use the stakeholder survey successfully are Lonza and adidas.
Both companies have implemented the micro-survey in their online report 2019. On a voluntary basis, users can indicate with one click to which stakeholder group they belong.
Several thousand users took part in the micro-survey. For the first time, the companies know, which stakeholder groups are using their report and what they are interested in.
In conclusion, there are enough analytic tools available that can determine, for example, page views and chapter usage, but unfortunately in most cases they are not able to identify specific user groups. As a result, it will be very difficult to develop precise target group approaches in the upcoming report.
Our stakeholder survey can bring light to this black spot in the analysis.
Feel free to contact us if you have any further questions about the tool.