Your voice shapes our events

Kate Hadley, Director of Events, explains how member feedback is crucial to building the PLSA’s 2023 events calendar.

Bringing the pensions industry together is what we do best. After over two long years of online events, being able to run many of our conferences and training courses as face-to-face physical events in 2022 has been a wonderful experience.
Feedback from delegates tells us that the main reasons that people come to our conferences are to network (83%) and to keep up to date with market trends (73%). Our ability to provide face-to-face networking opportunities once again is something that we know members have relished.

The delight of returning to face-to-face conferences was also clear from all within the PLSA team. It has been wonderful to be back doing what we know and enjoy, and to be on-site together again.

Covid-19 has significantly changed the events landscape, and the reality of returning to face-to-face events meant a lot of late nights and nail-biting moments. However, all the hard work paid off and our 2022 conferences have been hugely successful with a fantastic atmosphere on-site.

Listening to members

We are your pensions trade association. It’s important that we listen to members’ views on what you would like to see at future events and ensure that we continuously evolve and improve. We’ve taken the return to face-to-face events as an opportunity to review how we deliver them, making sure the conferences continue to attract members and provide them with value. We’ve also paid more attention to sustainability – working more closely with suppliers, producing our badges differently, and reducing our structures on-site to lower freight traffic to venues.

Forums for debate

The feedback that we receive from members is vital to what we do. We have heard that members would like to attend events with people like themselves from a similar area of pensions, facing similar challenges. They would like more opportunities to connect with similar people to discuss the issues and themes pertinent to their interests and background.

Next year, based on your feedback, we are introducing a brand-new series, PLSA Forums. This is aimed at senior professionals connected to the Local Government Pension Scheme, defined benefit schemes, master trusts and trusteeship. The Forums will be policy-driving and, as well as the mix of expert presentations you might expect, offer the opportunity for open discussion with other delegates and the policy experts.

Format revamp

We are also switching the length of our large conferences to 2.5 days – opening on the Tuesday lunchtime and then finishing on the Thursday afternoon. This is something that we know from feedback will benefit many people attending our conferences. It will allow for on-the-day travel and fewer nights away, offering even greater value.

And returning to how important we know that networking is to our members, we are also reintroducing the main conference dinners to the main programme and they will be open to all delegates. This should be a great addition to our 2023 conferences, especially since people’s opportunities to come together and connect have still been limited following the pandemic.

Continuing more of what you love

We have an exciting programme of events for you next year, which will include our popular programme of Policy Insight Webinars, where you can hear from our Policy & Advocacy team about what goes on behind the scenes in the PLSA’s policy and lobbying work.

We are also offering our three-part trustee training sessions, helping trustees with all levels of experience to manage a pension scheme confidently and effectively. If you are thinking of booking 2023 training before the end of the year for yourself or your trustees, you will pay 2022 prices.
There is a lot to look forward to in 2023, and we will continue being your network-building, member-backing, policy-driving PLSA.

View the 2023 event calendar