The report of the Supervisory Board as a compulsory publication shows the activities of the committee once a year. The report may be more than a compulsory exercise: by using credible linguistic stylistic means, it can make an important contribution to public trust in the company.

With the study “Integrated Financial Communications – An analysis of the cooperation of Corporate Communications and Investor Relations on Financial Communication topics”, the Center for Research in Financial Communication publishes the results of a broad empirical study of listed companies in the DACH region.

At the DIRK General Meeting on March 8, 2014 at Bayer AG in Leverkusen, Sandra Tietz and Kerstin Hammann discussed the study “Investors and Supervisory Board in Dialogue”.

The study was conducted by the Center for Research in Financial Communication in collaboration with Neidhart + Schön, Zurich, and the Center for Corporate Reporting (CCR). It examines the developments of the online annual report as an instrument of investor relations in Germany and Switzerland.

A strategy sets out the direction of the company and serves as a guide for internal and external stakeholders: What does the company do? What are its strengths? Where does it want to go – and how? The explanation of the corporate strategy is, beside the relationship building to relevant stakeholders and the publication of financial data, a central field of activity of financial communication. When communicating the corporate strategy to a broad public – even beyond capital market participants – the annual report plays an outstanding role.

The short study by the Center for Research in Financial Communication examines the prioritization of relevant stakeholders in the CEO letters of DAX30 companies in 2017. The analysis identifies 11 relevant stakeholder groups and shows which are most frequently addressed.

With its paper “Integrated Financial Communication: Analysis of the coordination and integration of investor relations and corporate communications with regards to financial communication tasks”, the team of the Center for Research in Financial Communication was contribution to the 64th Annual Meeting of the German Communication Association (DGPuK) which took place from May 09-11, 2019 in Münster.

How do capital market participants use annual reports, which channels, which content is relevant for them? So far, there is little empirical evidence about the expectations of professional report users.

The results of a quantitative survey of investor relations officers on the topic of dialogue between the supervisory board and investors was published in a May issue of the trade magazine “Der Aufsichtsrat”.

With its paper “Integrated Financial Communication. Insights on the coordination and integration among investor relations and public relations departments of listed corporations in Germany, Austria and Switzerland”Strategic Investor Relations Management: Insights on planning and evaluation practices among German Prime Standard Corporations” the team of the Center for Research in Financial Communication was contributing to the 69th annual conference of International Communication Association (ICA) which took place from May 25 – 28, 2019 in Washington D.C., USA.