For many public companies, proxy statements are more than just a mandatory annual exercise. They are a chance for a company to tell its story in a way that resonates with shareholders, employees, and customers. That was the case with Portland General Electric (PGE), a well-regarded, 150-year-old electric utility in the Pacific Northwest that needed to communicate its goals and actions around the transition to sustainable energy.

A Power Company With a Commitment to Positive Change

Serving almost a million retail customers, PGE both generates and distributes electricity, and aims to make ambitious changes to its infrastructure to keep up with the electrification of transportation and other fast-changing sectors. The Fortune 1000 company’s board has already benchmarked its corporate governance, environmental, and social performance to better set goals. Because of this groundwork, their story has several positive themes shareholders should be aware of including a track record of sourcing more of its power from renewable resources while still increasing revenues and keeping a strong governance regime in place to serve the long-term interests of shareholders, including a diverse board and leadership team.

But how to communicate all of that, plus the required disclosures and updates, to a diverse group of stakeholders?

Communicating With Consistency and Transparency

The utility engaged with Broadridge to produce a suite of corporate communications including its proxy statement, annual report, and a sustainability report. Broadridge provides a broad range of disclosure and communication services such as design, SEC filing, and consulting (through partner Third Economy), along with print and mail distribution to shareholders as well as management of annual shareholder meetings. Working with Broadridge for the design and execution of these important documents simplifies the annual meeting process for public companies and helps them achieve proxy goals. In this case, consolidating the design of the projects helped PGE reinforce their messages across disclosures and communications, conveying the value of their governance while offering some economies of scale in understanding the PGE brand and goals.

Under the title of “Advancing Towards a Clean Energy Future,” PGE and Broadridge executed a visual approach that aimed to be consistent across all documents, with the proxy statement and annual report serving as the foundation. Consistent fonts, iconography, page structures, colors, and image treatments linked similar materials across formats so that stakeholders could easily find and recognize the information they wanted.

Highlighting Performance, ESG and Influencing Shareholder Voting

By implementing a consistent and clear communications strategy across its annual shareholder communications, PGE was able to tell the story of its approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions while honoring its core values and high governance standards.

All three documents share a design philosophy that prioritizes transparency and ease of use, putting the company’s achievements in ESG, its financial performance, and governance policies in a format that is easy to use and understand. For the proxy statement, that approach allowed PGE to better influence how shareholders vote on important issues by discussing the board’s views and recommendations and highlighting the strong oversight and independence of its diverse board. The ESG report succeeded in emphasizing the company’s goals to decarbonize, electrify, and perform. Broadridge made the process easy and helped set a foundation for PGE’s shareholder communication in years to come.

Your Partner of Choice

Public companies rightfully have a heavy burden when it comes to shareholder communication. Getting those communications right often means going beyond just what’s required. Telling a brand’s story while helping to educate stakeholders on important governance and sustainability issues enhances the value the company can deliver long-term. By using a single vendor to design and execute those communications, companies can better define and illustrate how they’re performing and where a board’s priorities lie as well as simplify the process by relying on a single source of expertise.