PROFESSIONAL AND PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT
THE FUTURE OF EVENTS IS BRIGHT
When COVID-19 hit back in the spring of 2020 , our events team acted swiftly and decisively , moving the industry ’ s largest event programme online to ensure that our Members and Clients continued to access the very best learning , insight and support . Since then , we have delivered more events to more advisers than ever before and , in September of this year , we were delighted to once again deliver face-to-face events , alongside our equally popular virtual programme , paving the way for a new breed of event delivery . 2020 started like any other year for the events team . No sooner had the Christmas tree been bundled back onto the loft , the team were already getting ready for the first round of events – the Investment Forums , visiting 21 venues across the country . This was the first of many planned physical events , with a number of hotels and venues secured , partners ready and waiting , and a team poised for another year – but little did we know , all that was about to change . After a successful start , we were nearing the end of the first round of events and then it hit . A week shy of the end of round one , the team were now working tirelessly to call every single venue booked for the entire year to postpone our bookings – not knowing at the time just when we would be able to visit ( we certainly didn ’ t envisage it being 18 months !). Whilst doing that , we begun to work on a new strategy to ensure that we were able to continue to deliver valuable learning to advisers at a time where our core delivery mechanism had been taken away from us , and what resulted has changed the very nature of our event programme for years to come .
Introducing virtual events Virtual events as a concept were , of course , not new to us . The Advice Show had been building momentum for a number of years , with several hundred advisers tuning in each time to watch live broadcasts from our adopted studios in London . Each programme brought a rich mix of insight , debate , and guidance from a raft of industry experts , usually not accessible to us with the demands a physical round of events brings . Chief Investment Officers , leading fund managers , CEOs and more assembled to debate the topic of the day , whilst viewers sat back , relaxed , and took it all in from home , or indeed wherever they happened to be . Forearmed with our knowledge of the inner workings of the Advice Show , we quickly partnered with a leading event platform based in the US ( which made for interesting calls as we worked around the time difference ) and crafted a new virtual events platform , capable of delivering volume and quality in an extremely short time . The events and digital teams combined to deliver a fantastic solution and one that we had live and broadcasting in May , meaning we lost literally no time in our events schedule . The platform stood the test of time – yes , it creaked a little at the seams as we loaded on record numbers of attendees and we expanded our team to pull in the adviser services team to ensure we have enough people to take calls , as advisers begun to get to grips with not only a new system , but the pitfalls of working from home – but we weathered that early storm and we continued to deliver event after event to more and more advisers – and got to compare the kitchens of our many presenters as we went !
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