One of the big questions at this odd moment in the advisory profession’s history is this: After COVID imposed a 16-month lockdown on travel, when will advisors get back to in-person conferences? And when they do, which conferences are they most likely to attend?
I just released a white paper that offers the results of a survey of 560 advisors from around the country, in partnership with Joel Bruckenstein of T3 (sponsored by Concenter Services, AssetBook and the AdviceTech.LIVE virtual showcase). We asked advisors when things might return to normal, the most important considerations for them when deciding which conferences to attend, which aspects of the conference experience they valued most in the conferences they’ve attended, and whether they prefer in-person or virtual conference experiences.
Most importantly, we asked them to rate the conferences they have attended on a scale of 1-10, which allowed us to calculate an overall ”user satisfaction” rating of 19 conferences (and similar data on eight more) – giving us the first empirical evidence of the “best” conferences in the advisor space. There have been several “best conference” reports in the past (including a number that I authored, and more recently by Michael Kitces). But this is the first report that offers a guide to the conference scene using survey data from advisors who have attended those meetings.
What did we find?
Advisors find in-person conferences to be far more valuable than virtual attendance of the same meeting. Among our respondents, 82.18% said they get more value from an in-person than a virtual conference; just 8.44% said they prefer virtual conference experiences. (Just over 9% didn’t seem to care one way or the other.)
The reason advisors prefer the in-person experience is shown clearly in one of our charts. We asked about the most important things advisors are looking for when they plan which conference to attend, and “Wanted to network with my peers” was the second-highest ranking value, with a rating of 7.86 out of 10. This is not available to advisors who attend a conference virtually. And the number four consideration – “Attractive conference location/venue” (7.32 out of 10) – is also not a part of the virtual experience.
There were several surprises in this part of the survey, but we were not at all surprised that advisors listed, as their number-one consideration: “Topics and content relevant to my business,” with a near-unanimous 8.96 rating. In the conference space, advisors told us that they want to experience great session content, and this is far more important than any other factor.
What was not important? Among the lower-ranked considerations was “needing CEs,” with a surprisingly low 4.63 overall rating. This almost certainly reflects the fact that advisors today no longer need to attend conferences to meet their CE requirements. They can get CE credits almost daily by attending sponsored webinar events in their offices. Add to that the fact that in-person conferences have opened their doors to virtual attendees, making it even easier to obtain needed CEs.
We asked what the advisor respondents found most valuable in the conferences they had attended (which types of sessions, which exhibitors, etc.), and the top two responses happened to be the kinds of presentations that rarely grant CE credits: 1) “Practice management-related presentations” (7.89 rating) and 2) “Client service-related presentations” (7.78). “Tech-related presentations” (7.70) and “Presentations about the future of the profession” (7.47) were also among the most valuable.
Among the less-highly-rated were some surprises. “Keynote presentations by famous speakers” – which some of the larger conferences use as a primary draw – was 10th on the overall list, below two aspects of the exhibit hall experience “New tech opportunities” (7.21) and “New service and outsource providers” (6.72). More surprising: “Investment-related presentations” was near the bottom as the least valuable conference experiences, just above “Conference vendors explaining their products” (5.53) “Presentations by custodian/BD host executives” (4.81) and, at the very bottom, “Exhibit hall: new investment opportunities” (4.76).
These are the ratings for in-person experiences; we also asked for a rating for virtual experiences for each of these elements. In general, advisors gave the virtual version lower ratings than the in-person version – pretty much across the board. There is less enthusiasm for a virtual conference experience than the in-person experience.
Readers can download the full survey on the Inside Information website (www.bobveres.com), and they should turn immediately to page 9, where we listed the conferences in rank order, from highest overall score to the lowest. The most interesting finding here is how many of the niche conferences outperformed larger meetings.
The five most highly rated meetings were, in order, the FPA Northern California Regional Conference (8.50 overall rating), the Insider’s Forum conference (8.40), the T3 Advisor conference (7.92), the Riskalyze Fearless Investing Summit (7.86) and the AICPA PFP Summit (7.84). None of these meetings take place in a large convention hall. Lower down the list, you find the giant meetings: LPL Focus (7.26), the Investments & Wealth Institute ACE conference (7.25), Schwab IMPACT (7.03), the Morningstar Investment Conference (6.71) and the FPA National meeting (6.33).
What gives? There are certainly more attendees at the larger conferences, but our survey shows that advisors have not gotten as much value from them as the smaller meetings they’ve attended. The smaller meetings don’t have as many of those host custodian/BD presentations that advisors find little value in, and they are providing a more focused networking experience for attendees. You might attend the Schwab national meeting and never find the friends and colleagues that you wanted to hang with, while a meeting with 300 attendees – especially if it consciously provides networking opportunities and attracts successful advisors –gives an enhanced opportunity for attendees to compare notes.
The association events were not forgotten in the survey; among the leading conferences were the NAPFA Fall, NAPFA Spring and FPA Retreat meetings, with ratings of 7.58, 7.48 and 7.41, respectively. But these, too, are relatively small meetings with high networking opportunities, rather than huge conventions where one could get lost in the vastness of the exhibit hall.
The highest-rated large event was the AICPA ENGAGE conference, which offers the best technical content in the advisor-related conference scene. Its 7.38 rating put it at number nine on our list. Among advisors, ENGAGE almoswwt certainly lost appeal when, a couple of years ago, the AICPA decided to lump the PFP meeting into a much larger conference that brings together estate planners, tax practitioners, tech consulting and even auditors, all searching for their sessions in the same giant venue. But when we looked at ENGAGE’s rating among AICPA PFP members, their 8.59 average rating would have put the conference at the top of our list. (Non-AICPA PFP section members gave ENGAGE a combined 6.45 rating.)
The full report includes a list of national conferences that were written-in by survey respondents, which gives a sense of the sheer scope of the total conference ecology. We asked people to name any speakers that they would like to see at future conferences or that they have enjoyed in past ones. Those are listed in order of the number of times they were cited. We asked for comments, and all of those are included in an appendix; the most interesting theme was that advisors are apparently very tired of political presentations in this increasingly partisan political environment.
Going forward, national meetings are going to offer in-person and virtual registrations, which will complicate their economics. By offering virtual registrations, they might raise the total number of attendees and, therefore, their economic base and “reach.” But that will reduce the number of in-person attendees, which will compromise the exhibit hall experience for conference sponsors.
Extrapolating data from another chart, many advisors are eager to resume in-person attendance this fall – and, indeed, some are ready now. But a significant cohort is more cautious. Will this result in greater or lesser attendance of the next round of meetings? We don’t know the answer. Some people who have reliably attended conferences in the past will wait a bit longer to make their travel and registration arrangements.
As mentioned earlier, this comprehensive guide to the national meetings can be downloaded on the Inside Information website, so you can see the full report. I suspect that many in the advisor community will use it to determine when and how they will reintegrate back into the conference scene after a long pandemic pause kept them at home.
Bob Veres' Inside Information service is the best practice management, marketing, client service resource for financial services professionals. Check out his blog at: www.bobveres.com.
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One of the big questions at this odd moment in the advisory profession’s history is this: After COVID imposed a 16-month lockdown on travel, when will advisors get back to in-person conferences? And when they do, which conferences are they most likely to attend?
