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31 March 2025 16 min read

The Ultimate Guide to Virtual AGMs

For businesses looking to increase the reach of their annual general meeting (AGM) and utilise their resources more effectively, a virtual AGM is an increasingly popular option. In this guide to virtual AGMs, you can find out how the different formats work, the benefits of engaging investors online, steps to take to hold a successful meeting and how to choose a virtual AGM platform that offers the interactivity and transparency that lay the foundation for a successful AGM.

Many companies across Europe are leveraging this format for secure, interactive and engaging shareholder meetings. In this scenario, participants can join in person or remotely and the company still ensures executives remain accountable.

In Europe, 54.9% of Norwegian companies opted for an entirely virtual AGM during the 2024 season—the most of any nation on the continent. Businesses in Greece (38.9%) and Germany (36.9%) were also keen on a remote approach to AGM planning.

The hybrid approach was popular in Spain, where nearly half of issuers (47.7%) gave shareholders the option to choose whether they participated in AGMs remotely or in person. Iceland was the second most popular location for hybrid AGMs, with 47.4% held in this format, followed by Portugal (38.1%). The UK also saw significant adoption of hybrid shareholder meetings, with 22% of FTSE 350 companies offering this option.

  • Companies in regulated markets are shifting towards digital AGMs to enhance transparency and investor engagement
  • The adoption of virtual and hybrid AGMs is increasing across Europe, with Norway leading the way
  • Virtual AGMs improve accessibility, allowing shareholders to join from anywhere
  • Hybrid AGMs offer flexibility, combining in-person and remote participation
  • Choosing the right virtual AGM platform is key to a seamless experience
  • Interactive features enhance participation and create a more engaging experience
Factor Virtual AGM Hybrid AGM Physical AGM
Format Fully online, conducted via a webinar platform Combination of in-person and virtual participation Traditional in-person meeting at a physical venue
Accessibility High – Shareholders can join from anywhere High – Investors can choose the method of participation that works for them Limited – Only those who can physically attend are present
Engagement Interactive features (live Q&A, polls, real-time voting, chat functionality) but lacks face-to-face interaction Best of both worlds – Allows real-time online participation while maintaining in-person networking High for in-person attendees but those unable to attend miss out
Cost efficiency Lower costs (no venue, travel, catering). Companies pay for the virtual AGM software Moderate costs (smaller venue required than in-person events. Investment required for tech setup) Higher costs (venue hire, travel, logistics, catering, possibly accommodation for some internal stakeholders)
Technology requirements Requires a reliable webcast platform with security features Requires a webinar platform that provides seamless integration between in-person and virtual tools Standard AV setup for presentations
Transparency and compliance Digital records, secure online voting, full session recordings Strong compliance if the company ensures that there is a procedure in place to accurately combine online and in-person votes Standard compliance procedures but may lack transparency for those not in attendance
Shareholder experience Convenient, flexible, but some may feel disconnected if not managed correctly More inclusive, providing multiple options for participation In-person engagement but limits participation to those physically present
Networking and interaction Online chat functionality and features to submit questions The option between physical networking and using the chat feature Attendees can engage directly with management and other shareholders
Challenges Risk of technical issues, potential disengagement Requires strong coordination between virtual and physical elements Travel and accessibility limitations, higher costs, logistical complexities
Best for Companies with a global investor base or cost-conscious approach Organisations seeking maximum inclusivity and flexibility Businesses prioritising traditional governance and face-to-face interactions

There are many reasons why companies hold a virtual or hybrid AGM. These include cost savings and enhanced accessibility for stakeholders, improved engagement, efficiency and enhanced security.

Geo-data specialist Fugro chooses virtual IR events because they allow it to communicate with global investors and analysts simultaneously, providing enhanced transparency. Similarly, financial firm Rubis Group also enjoys the opportunity to reflect the global nature of its operations by engaging shareholders online, also citing the fact that its IR events have looked more professional and enhanced participant buy-in since going online.

Here are the steps you need to follow to create a successful virtual or hybrid AGM.

One of the issues with in-person AGMs is that they often take place during working hours, which makes them tricky to attend for investors who might have a number of AGMs to attend in close succession and in a variety of locations during the season.

Think about where your key shareholders are located and avoid conflicts with major financial events and public holidays, for example. If a significant portion of your shareholding is based overseas, take time zones into account to make it accessible for them.

The virtual AGM platform you use will have a bearing over the success of your meeting, so make sure that you choose an option that meets your requirements. You need software that will allow as many shareholders as possible to engage in the event, watching in high quality and without buffering so they do not miss important information.

Think about who is going to attend your meeting and how a platform can make for a better experience for them. For example, construction giant RoyalBAM Group has shareholders across Europe and the world. It uses a virtual AGM platform to simulcast the event in both Dutch and English to increase its potential reach.

Encourage your investors to register to attend the virtual AGM. This provides them with a calendar entry to block out the time accordingly and to send them a reminder before the event. This makes it more likely that they will attend and will do so more fully prepared. It also helps your company know who will participate in the meeting. Dutch financial firm Rabobank uses a pre-registration system to gain insight on who will be watching its investor relations events.

To run a successful meeting, it takes a team in which all individuals understand their role and how they contribute to a smooth, interactive and effective AGM.

Here are some examples of the roles you need to fill for your virtual AGM:

  • Attendee supervisor: Manages registrations and attendance tracking.
  • Presenter: Introduces participants and presents motions.
  • Moderator: Oversees online interactions to ensure they don’t stray away from fair comment.
  • Question supervisor: Collates questions for the panel and submits them during the Q&A.
  • Engagement monitor: Analyses interactive features to ensure attendees are engaging with the meeting, encouraging conversations if activity dips.
  • Vote supervisor: Conducts polls and announces and records results.
  • Technical support: Addresses technical issues during the meeting.

Companies need to ensure their AGMs include as many shareholders and representatives as possible to display transparency and show that the board is willing to be held accountable by the investment community. However, there is a competitive landscape and investors will receive invitations to attend a large number of AGMs during the season.

To persuade them to participate in your shareholder meeting, you need to pique their interest with the meeting agenda that you send out in advance. Consider what value you can provide, whether it is a guest speaker who is an expert on a relevant topic or a running order that proves you are open to discussing investor concerns in a full and frank manner.

Plan your AGM with confidence using our AGM Toolkit, which includes a ready-to-use AGM agenda template and a comprehensive AGM preparation checklist. Ensure your meeting stays organised, transparent and engaging.

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You need to make sure that your presenters and panel are comfortable with the process of holding your AGM online, remembering to address the camera as well as the audience in the room, if holding a hybrid meeting. Your support team will also benefit from a run-through of the meeting so that they can understand how everything works and where potential issues may arise.

By getting the online section of the meeting running early, you ensure that everything is working as it should be and you have something there for attendees to look at if they join before the official start time. Put a placeholder on the screen with details of the meeting. This will give you the chance to follow the viewing link to see if it is streaming as it should.

Have a team member tasked with checking the levels of interaction with the meeting. If they drop and it seems like investors are becoming disengaged, they can use the chat to ask questions and start conversations. This will bring them back towards playing a more active role in the event.

Belgian real estate corporation Cofinimmo values the opportunity for shareholders to ask questions during its IR events. Internal stakeholders can answer them within the meeting and help create closer bonds between the issuer and its shareholders.

Save a recording of the event and embed it in your IR website so that anyone can watch on demand. This allows you to reach additional shareholders and displays transparency over the events of the AGM. The recording acts as a permanent record of the resolutions agreed upon and how the debate panned out before the meeting reached the decisions it made.

The CSR Association also found that having an embedded video of its IR meetings allowed stakeholders to share certain segments on social media, repurposing the content of the meeting and increasing its reach.

One of the most important elements of an AGM is the question and answer session, where investors have the opportunity to challenge the board and hold executives to account. Here are some important strategies to ensure an effective Q&A that provides value to attendees.

  • Practice answers on tricky topics to ensure your panel is fully prepared on the day of the meeting. Through shareholder analysis and engagement, you should be aware of key concerns, which will allow you to get ahead of the questions and craft a frank answer that shows how you are handling the matter.
  • Encourage audience participation in the invitation and at the start of the meeting so that you get questions submitted early. This helps the moderator start to compile them ahead of the designated Q&A session.
  • Clearly explain the Q&A guidelines before you start. This helps shareholders understand how to submit questions and how they will be handled by the panel. Set expectations early. Be honest about how you will moderate them, how long the session is and what happens with unanswered questions.
  • Moderate participant questions fairly and do not filter any out because they are seemingly difficult. The AGM is all about transparency, so make sure that there are genuine reasons for not asking questions, other than that they might be awkward for the board.
  • Address challenging questions professionally and with respect. Consider what the reason for asking the question is and try to understand why an investor might feel the need to put it to the board. Be empathetic and give a straight answer, ending on a positive note about how you might resolve their issue or strategies you have in place to manage the situation.
  • Use a structured approach to group similar questions together and save time in the meeting. The question moderator should look for similar themes and try to collate the main ideas and queries together, acknowledging individuals’ input when putting the question to the panel.
  • Follow up on unanswered questions after the event. Apologise for not managing to tackle the query in the meeting, but provide a full and frank response either in writing or during a call. Don’t leave your investors thinking that you were ignoring them or avoiding certain subjects.
  • Prepare and distribute the AGM meeting minutes in a timely manner. This makes it easier to recall the events that took place clearly and provide an accurate representation of the meeting. By sending minutes out to attendees soon after the meeting, you maintain the engagement that you built before and during the AGM, nurturing the relationships between the business and its shareholders.
  • Gather and evaluate participant feedback to help you understand what worked with your virtual AGM and where the opportunities for improvement are. This will help you shape your future IR activity and improve engagement with your investors.
  • Archive your AGM documents securely to create an audit trail of your activity. They should be in a format that you can protect so that no unauthorised person can compromise its integrity and so you can search for the documentation you need easily in the future.
  • Implement the action points agreed during the meeting, assigning them to stakeholders and providing deadlines to ensure they are held accountable for completing them. Track their progress towards completing the tasks to ensure that the decisions made do not fall by the road and are carried out in a timely manner.

Your virtual AGM software of choice should be intuitive and easy to use both for your team and your attendees. Not only does this help you organise and run events in an efficient and effective manner, but it reduces any barriers to attending that there might be.

Voting is a key element of your virtual AGM, so make sure your AGM software allows attendees to cast secure, real-time votes that you can record for your audit trail.

The platform that you use must meet strict security requirements, including being ISO 27001 certified and offering multifactor authentication. It should encrypt data to prevent contraventions of GDPR and other data protection legislation around the world.

If the AGM platform cannot handle the amount of traffic that you require, users will experience glitches and buffering. When PwC wanted to engage thousands of stakeholders at once, it sought software that took advantage of peer-to-peer technology, reducing the bandwidth needed by 95% and offering a smooth and professional experience to attendees.

With shareholders attending multiple AGMs during the season, you need to include interactive elements, such as polls and Q&A sessions, in the process to prevent fatigue that leads to them becoming passive observers.

As the highlight of the IR calendar, the AGM is an opportunity to work on relationship-building with shareholders. Make sure your platform integrates with your CRM, document management workflow and other processes.

Seek out an AGM platform that with 24/7 support, a track record of reliability and guarantees on uptime. Look at reviews by other businesses to ensure it meets the expectations of companies in a similar position.

Look for shareholder meeting software that provides a recording of your AGM that you can use after the event. This includes embedding it into your website, extracting short clips for social media and as a record of the events that occurred for your archive.

Seek out an AGM platform that provides other functionality to help you make your meeting more accessible. Think about device and location-agnostic solutions and those that offer captions and real-time translations.

To assess the success of your AGM, set some KPIs that will help you understand how effective your efforts have been. These should include:

  • Attendance and engagement statistics, detailing who participated in the event and how active they were during the meeting.
  • Voting participation to understand how many people wanted to have their say on the matters at hand.
  • Assessing the effectiveness of the Q&A session. Did people participate, did you work your way through enough questions and were attendees satisfied with the answers received?
  • Evaluating the technical performance of the virtual meeting by using internal monitoring in addition to requesting feedback from remote participants, collating their experiences.
  • Gathering more general post-AGM feedback too, so you can refine your processes for each stage of the meeting build-up and execution.

A virtual AGM is a shareholder meeting conducted either entirely online using a webcast or digital platform or in a hybrid format with an in-person element, allowing participants to engage remotely through live streaming.

Virtual AGMs are legally binding in many countries, as long as they comply with the relevant corporate governance laws, shareholder rights regulations and company byelaws in the jurisdiction where the business is registered.

Shareholders typically register for a virtual AGM through an online portal, where they verify their identity, receive secure login credentials and access meeting materials before the event.

The chairperson coordinates the meeting, ensures compliance with governance protocols, moderates discussions, facilitates shareholder participation and oversees voting procedures.

Company secretaries manage the AGM logistics, ensure compliance with corporate governance requirements, prepare and distribute meeting notices and minutes and oversee shareholder communication.

Ensure cybersecurity by using a secure webcast platform with encryption, multi-factor authentication for participants, controlled access to sensitive documents and regular security audits.

Common mistakes include poor technical preparation, lack of interactive features, failure to provide clear voting instructions, insufficient shareholder engagement and inadequate cybersecurity measures.

Holding a virtual AGM is essential in the world in which we live, where companies’ shareholders are dispersed around the country and even the globe. To ensure that investors have a fair opportunity to hold the company and its board to account during this meeting, you need to use a secure, robust virtual AGM platform with interactive features that allow remote participants to contribute as much as those in the room.

Company Webcast offers peace of mind for both the company and meeting participants, with an ISO 27001 certification to evidence its guarantee of security and efficiency. Using peer-to-peer technology, it can handle large volumes of traffic whilst providing a stable stream and its interactive features keep shareholders engaged. Users can take advantage of captions and real-time translations, casting their vote in a secure manner in full possession of the facts. If you want to make your AGM more efficient and engaging, request a demo of Company Webcast today.

 

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