In 2010 the Queensland Government and its investment banking advisers turned to us when they were undertaking the multi-billion dollar privatisation of the State’s coal and freight rail haulage network – QR National.

After we took the call to pitch for the offer’s web services role we looked back at our key learnings from our commissions on the Telstra 2 and 3 share offers and the NSW Government’s Snowy Hydro IPO before it was called off near the end of its pre-registration phase.

While those share offers worked well from our online perspective we believed each facet was still largely approached in a silo approach. This is natural given how the numerous moving parts of a large capital raising are broken down into distinctive functions and delivered by specialist providers.

However, our view is digital has become the preferred primary channel for investors and electronic banking is now ubiquitous. So we pitched we’d run digital as the central hub of the retail offer from both a marketing and logistics standpoint and that all providers would pull together to make digital the primary investor channel ahead of print, post and call centres.

We also believed a digital centric approach to retail investors would reach more potential investors, swiftly move them into the share offer and ultimately result in more funds raised from the retail channel than would be achieved by a standard print based approach.

At the commencement of the planning stage we met with all logistics and marketing providers to brief them how we were looking to position the online channel and how each of their respective tasks could feed into this in an integrated approach.

This was a great ice-breaker at the start of the project and meant we working closely with the other providers such as the PR consultants and ad agency from a marketing perspective and with the share registry, mailhouse and call centre on the logistics front.

This integrated approach meant we were best armed to provide the joint lead managers with clear advice when reporting into the various working streams we covered across advertising, marketing and logistics and, of course, online.

And so what were the results?

• We delivered more than 6 million web pages on the share offer to more than 650,000 Australians.
• Online took more than 240,000 pre-registrations being 97% of the total.
• The online prospectus was viewed more than 45,000 times while 72,000 copies were downloaded. Less than 15,000 people requested a hardcopy prospectus be mailed to them.
• More than 570,000 emails were sent to potential investors to promote the offer.
• More than 40,000 shareholders used the website to look up their shareholding once allocated.