NZSA Events Committee – 2016 Survey update

In 2016 the Events Committee was involved in the delivery of 13 events to members. We are using your feedback in the Members survey to shape the events which will be taking place in 2017, and so wanted to share some of the results with you.

Interest areas

Our conclusion – it’s not really surprising to see that there is a broad range of interests across the society, and so as well as catering to the Life Insurance and General Insurance interests, we need to have events spread across a range of topics.

“The variety seems good in general but perhaps a little less focus on insurance and a little more on other areas, including wider fields”

There was also some great feedback for specific ideas for speakers and we’ll be looking to deliver some of those over the next year.

Timing of events
89% of respondents were happy with the range of different event times (e.g. breakfasts,lunches,evenings), and of those remaining only three members were not happy (8% did not answer the question).

In addition to asking about the time of day, we asked an explicit question about the time at which evening events should begin. Members were asked to rank half-hourly times between 4pm and 6:30pm in terms of their preference for evening events to begin.

In order to determine the most popular starting time, we used a Single Transferrable Vote approach (because hey, we’re actuaries and just can’t help ourselves). We did this separately for Wellington and Auckland to allow for the different ways businesses are spread around each city.

In Wellington, the preference was for events starting at 5pm, 4pm and 5:30pm (in that order). In Auckland, the times were the same, but in a different order, with 5pm still coming in top, followed by 5:30pm and 4pm. In both cities, looking at the first place rankings only (rather than a single transferrable vote) there was a relatively even split between these three times.

Our conclusion – Members preference is for evening events to start at 5pm, but we should try to vary the start times throughout the year to capture how close the results really were.

“Try to vary the day of the week. Events seem to overlap with some regular weekly appointments I have.”

Verbatim
We are grateful to members for their candid feedback, below are a couple of excerpts from the survey results, which we’ll take on board for the coming year.

• “Orientation event (primarily for student members).”
• “More events on the North Shore if in Auckland (they are always in the central city).”
• “You guys do a great job – I really like the variety of events, and they are both fun and professional”
• “…discussing parallel topics to one/those being covered by one of AU/UK/US societies; could also work ie use an existing paper and have someone facilitate a discussion.”

If you have any further comments which you would like to share, or ideas for presentations, please get in touch with the Events Committee via the Secretariat.