A Third Of IRs Do Not Measure Against Set KPIs. Why So?
Proving fund marketing impact to the C-suite is difficult. Even more so without using measurable KPIs as a foundation, strongly lacking at many firms.
Irwin’s 2026 State of Investor Relations report has clarified a message many marketers and IRs will have thought: “activity is up, but attributional impact is down.” Out of the two-thirds of 223 IR professionals around the world that do formally operate under clear key performance indicators, a further quarter believe they’re measuring their output effectively.
The elephant in the room is the fact that AI tools, which exist to assist operational hurdles, are being adopted by 42% of IR functions, but do not necessarily prove ROI.
This boils down to an idea that adding more digital tools does not necessarily equal efficiency. Only 27% of teams that wanted to offset administrative burdens this way are actually satisfied. They cite a usual inefficiency offender, a fragmented system, over any convoluted setups caused by increasing headcounts.
At the same time, more than half of teams at mid-cap companies are placing more focus on face-to-face meetings with investors, including storytelling and narrative consistency. We can see this as an act against digital tools’ capabilities to exponentially ramp-up outreach volumes. It seems the ‘numbers game’ mantra is valued less than the quality of interactions.
While only a few managers are fixing how to measure their campaigns using KPIs, others are chasing AI as a ‘silver bullet’ to better their investor communications, all without a KPI agenda in place. When that happens, no AI experiments can be easily justifiable as a healthy contributor to deal flows.
Going back to basics is no bad thing. Trackable intel such as response frequencies to fund updates, conversion rates, and active leads across content themes, formats and channels can quantify fund marketing impact before the need to add more and more tools.
And in cases where CRMs, email platforms and business intelligence tools are valuable, they will not alleviate the time-wasting manual outreach burdens if they’re not integrated and talking to each other. An emphasis should be placed on which technologies can prove IR and marketing team’s impact, before jumping back into the tech-vendor market without a plan.
On similar lines, ESG content has been labelled as “not important” to LPs by over half of the survey respondents. It’s a sign that content campaigns have to be tweaked to address the stories that investors want, as shown through their data, and not the assumptions of a firm based on years-old positioning to raise assets.
