Given the slow but steady falloff in individual investor voting that we have been witnessing since the 1970s, it’s hard for us to overstate what a huge and important development this is.
We were mightily impressed with last year’s addition of 50,000 new retail voters, driven by BofA’s pledge to donate $1 to the Special Olympics for every individual account that voted a proxy: This produced an 8% increase in normally declining retail-voter participation, which increased the quorum - and, very importantly, the number of pro-management votes that individual shareholders typically cast when they bother to vote at all - by a whopping four percentage points.
But this year’s results were truly eye-popping - although we must say we were pretty much on-the-money in our initial predictions:
This year’s promise of a $1 donation to Habitat For Humanity - another nonprofit that BofA has long supported - drew 269,000 new voters - a 41% increase over last year…which resulted in roughly $919,000 being donated!
What made us bet on such a big increase? And how did it happen?
- First and foremost is the marketing truism that to get results you need to “repeat, repeat and repeat” your message in order to generate awareness - and to succeed.
- Equally important, you need to position your messages prominently - so they will be noticed right off the bat. BofA did a masterful job of this last year, and this year, the message was even more prominently and frequently displayed; the very first, and very attention-getting thing that shareholders saw when they received and when they opened the proxy package.
- Of course, the message needs to be a compelling one. Here, BofA hit a bases-loaded home run. The choice of the charities were excellent ones in both years. (We ourselves have a pretty long list of charities we’d never donate to, as most people do, we think…But how many people could possibly quibble with, or fail to be moved by support for the Special Olympics or Habitat? Only the meanest of Scrooges we’d say.)
- Most compelling, however, were the attention-getting numbers: BofA was able to report that $650,000 had been donated last year - and that, we think, was a major motivating factor behind the huge number of new people who got on the bandwagon this year. (Next year, a $1 million goal will keep voters on the ranch - and will generate a lot more new participation, we feel certain.
BofA did another set of smart things to increase the always hard-to-get Employee Plan votes by using the Internet more effectively - with an educational video, and emailed reminders to get out the vote. The biggest and best thing, however; they were able to create a single “landing platform” for all Employee Plan accounts - and all of any other accounts employee owners had in its Merrill Lynch unit - so that one set of voting actions voted all the individual and employee owners’ positions.
ADVICE TO READERS: Take a very careful look at the 2018 BofA proxy materials - and at the many articles under the Individual Investors tab of our website www.optimizeronline.com.
Pay special attention to our Top-Ten Reasons to Grow - and to Guard Your Retail Investor Base, our Top-Tips on Motivating Investors to Vote - and our Top-Ten Ways to Disrespect Your Individual Investors, which, sadly, seem to be gaining new converts every day at penny-wise, pound foolish companies - and at misguided suppliers too.
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