Engagement on Stwrd

Stwrd aims to create an environment for research and engagement where companies, investors, stakeholders, and governments can collectively come together to discuss significant economic or societal matters and potentially develop solutions. The main means of doing this is through collective engagement.

Types of Collective Engagements

Open Discourse – A general purpose engagement that can be used for conversation. This can be a one-time educational session run by a stakeholder, a discussion with multiple parties on developing best practices, a Q/A session by an issue expert, a general relationship-building engagement, or a company addressing questions on their performance. This type of engagement is typically less formal and no specific outcome is required.

Research Review – A team or organization has produced research or a report that they wish to present to educate the community, to receive feedback, share their outcomes, or act as a catalyst for further action.

Shareholder Resolution – In this model, a company has not addressed the issues presented by a coalition of investors and stakeholders, and as such, an engagement is created to produce a formal request that will be presented at the annual general meeting. This is a formal, regulated approach which should be used with intent and a specific purpose.

Disclosure Campaign – A Disclosure Campaign is a request for more information on a topic directed at a company. This can be disclosure of an internal practice, policy or set of data. In many cases this information can then be used as a basis for further conversation and progress on an issue through setting of goals or targets, reporting, and maintaining accountability.

Corporate Engagement – Corporate engagement is a means for investors and/or stakeholders to reach out to corporations to address issues that the company or their stakeholders are facing. Examples include addressing a company’s competitive positioning, diversity in management, or the impacts of purchasing behaviors on their supply chain.

Working Group – This is a less structured type of engagement where a team conducts research into an issue or performance against an issue, such as reviewing regulations, community impacts, identifying industry trends or best practices.

Coalition Chat – A coalition chat is a home for a group of connected individuals or organizations to share ideas on the direction of the coalition, to develop plans, and take the next steps forward. This can include breakout rooms for projects or initiatives, links to engagements, a library or archive of documents, and can act as a single source for coalition management.

Personal or group conversations are great ways to ask quick questions, discuss issues, or network. You may wish to create a personal conversation with an individual or group to get everyone on the same page before creating a collective engagement. To create a conversation, simply go to the Interchange , click on “Start New” and select “Conversation”. Add the Stwrd users you wish to have in the conversation, and click “Go”.

A Collective Engagement is a means by which a group of investors or stakeholders come together with a company to share knowledge, address policy and process matters, or discuss potential courses of action on issues material to the company or broader society. It could be a means for an investor to help reduce risk or increase opportunities in the companies they invest in, or a means for a stakeholder to address a company’s operational externalities. All types of collective engagements can be executed using Stwrd.

Initially, you may wish to create a personal conversation with an individual or group to get everyone on the same page before creating an engagement. Once the collective engagement is created, members can see all content (except breakout rooms they are not members of). To create a personal conversation, see above.

Once you are ready to start a collective engagement on Stwrd, go to the Interchange, click on “Start New”, and click “Collective Engagement”. Type in the relevant information, keeping in mind that you can change anything in the future, except making a private engagement public (due to transparency concerns).

Once in the collective engagement, you can:

• Send messages via chat
• Share documents
• Link to information in Stwrd via URL
• Hold conference calls – to launch a conference call in a collective engagement, click on “Meeting” and “Start Meeting”; all members of the collective engagement can participate.
• Schedule meetings or events (Meeting -> Schedule Meeting)
• Create breakout rooms for more focused discussion

When collective engagements have finished, you may close them if you are a moderator by clicking on the contextual overlay button  for the collective engagement and clicking “Close Engagement”. No further information can be added to the engagement unless the engagement is reopened prior to it being archived. A link is available to the record of the engagement for sharing it with colleagues, other stakeholders, or even your clients to show your level of participation and impact.

There are four member types in Stwrd: Observers, Participants, Administrators and Moderators. Most people in an engagement will be Participants.

• Observers can see all content in the engagement but cannot participate. They cannot add commentary, documents, and so on. They also may not participate in breakout rooms, though they can be added to breakout rooms as observers.
• Participants can chat, add documents, and generally participate in the engagements and breakout rooms. Participants can also create breakout rooms.
• Moderators have full access to the engagement. They can invite and remove users, comment, add documents, pin documents, edit the engagement’s record, create breakout rooms, and so on. Moderators act as internal points of contact for the engagement process and often act as active participants as well.
• Administrators also have full access to the engagement, though their role would be different. Unlike a moderator who would participate in the engagement, administrators would typically work behind the scenes, managing documentation, invitations and users, and so on.

The four member types are for technical management of the platform. Your engagement may have other roles that are more loosely defined. For example, you may have primary points of contact, archivists or record keepers, external or media contacts, investor leads, and so on that are roles that they play in the engagement without having any technical functionality behind it.

Members of a breakout room have access to the same functionality found within the collective engagement except for creating another nested breakout room.

No matter where you go in Stwrd, you will have quick access to your conversations and comments via the context-aware sidebar. Quickly jump back to it and add notes in conversations based on your analysis, add additional comments open to the community, and streamline your processes through direct access to engagement at any time.

Comments are a fundamental aspect of engaging with others directly on information on the platform. You can add comments to many parts of Stwrd, including directly on data points within a time series analysis or on punchcards by clicking “comments” , and entering it via the sidebar. Adding comments allows you to ask questions, offer suggestions, and provide clarification or expertise on data points, filings, or documents. Users can also add comments by clicking on a contextual overlay button where visible , clicking “Add Comment”, entering your text and then saving it. You can view all of your comments in the sidebar or in the lower left-hand side of the Interchange.

Stwrd takes privacy and transparency very seriously. Some conversations need to remain private, but we always strive for transparent communications. 

At a high level, privacy works as follows:

• All personal conversations and group conversations are fully private. If a person is added to a conversation, they cannot see the previous messages, attachments, and so on.
• Collective engagements can be discoverable or hidden. This simply means that if there is a company or organization associated with an engagement and it is discoverable, then it will show up under “Engagements” for that company or organization. If clicked on, a user can request to be a participant or observer. The contents of the engagement are not visible unless the user joins the engagement. Once a user is accepted into the engagement, the full history of the engagement is visible.
• If a collective engagement is closed (meaning the engagement is complete), then no changes can be made to the content of the engagement unless it is reopened. A closed engagement becomes archived x days after closing, where x is the number of days in the Archive field for the engagement (0-365 days), which is accessible while editing the engagement via the contextual overlay. After that, the engagement cannot be reopened and the engagement record will be discoverable even if it was flagged as hidden.
• Breakout rooms can be public or private. Members of the engagement who are not in a private breakout room will not see that the breakout room exists nor see any of its content. Public breakout rooms will be visible by members of the collective engagement.
• Comments on data points, punchcards, etc. are visible to everyone.

Feel free to reach out to Stwrd’s Head of Corporate and Stakeholder Engagement, Mark Stephan (mark@verityplatforms.com) and he will be happy to discuss the engagement process with you, answer any questions you may have, and work through any issues you come across.