We have collated the results of the ‘options for the future’ survey that many of you completed over the summer. We will be going through these in more detail at the 19 November AGM, but wanted to provide feedback to society members in advance of this. Many thanks for providing your thoughts and ideas, as well as answering the survey questions, which has given the Committee clear guidance for our next steps!
Here are the main highlights:
- The questionnaire was completed (all or in part) by 312 members, of which 255 were on-line and 57 paper copies. This represents about 5% of total members, and about 16% of ‘active’ members. Any result above 10% is considered good for this kind of survey.
- There is a good level of satisfaction with the current offer, including many verbatim ‘keep up the good work’ comments.
- The demographics of respondents was strongly biased to the over 70s, at over 75% of respondents, of whom nearly half were over 80.
- However, mainly due to health / mobility / event proximity issues, only about one-third of those surveyed actually participate in events. Other less-cited reasons were relevance of events / time available / living abroad and, interestingly, membership of other bp networks.
- The newsletter has had overwhelmingly positive feedback overall, but with some respondents requesting less corporate news and more stories from members.
- Of the new proposed offers, support for ‘informal gatherings’ was strong at 80%. Support for ‘insight events’ was positive, but less so at 61%.
- There were slightly negative responses for both meeting more in person and meeting more online. This reflects demographics / travel and IT confidence, although perhaps surprisingly the offer of additional IT training was not supported, with a 73% decline rate.
- There was overwhelming support at 92% and 82% respectively for auto-enrolment and a free first year of membership, although more lukewarm support for members inviting new members, at 45%.
There were also a number of ‘free form’ comments in the boxes provided in the survey, here is the main feedback:
- For insight event topics, bp strategy, climate change and AI / technology were the clear leaders, followed by energy markets and geopolitics. There were a few requests for ‘other’ topics, including bp history, the arts, and wills.
- For insight event speakers, the main preferences were for ‘top quality experts’ and both current bp management and former CEOs (Browne, Simon). Climate experts were the next most popular and a good suggestion was to hold these as panel sessions with a moderator and several contributors.
- A few other interesting suggestions included more ‘theme’ based events, rather than regional ones, and creating an anonymous ‘scattermap’ of bps member addresses to show where others live to facilitate getting together.
As a result of the survey and following the September bps council meeting, we plan to progress as follows:
- Go ahead with the informal gathering idea and start piloting in early 2025.
- Go ahead with the insight events, but just two in-person ones in 2025, one at the summer party, one at the AGM. bp strategy / climate change / AI and tech would be the likely topics. One of these could be a panel session with international experts, and we will video the session and make it available for all members.
- We will discuss the possibility of auto-enrolment with bp pensions, facilitated by a first year of free membership.
- For the newsletter in general, reduce some of the corporate content in favour of more member-led stories.
- Consider the ‘scattermap’ idea and how this could be used to bring events closer to members.
Thanks again for your support!
Dominic Emery