Paraplanners Powwow

Having been elected to the board of the Institute of Financial Planning in October 2012, one of our clients, Richard Allum, had an election promise to keep – and he asked us to think about the best way to help him keep it.

What was the problem?

Having been elected to the board of the Institute of Financial Planning in October 2012, one of our clients, Richard Allum, had an election promise to keep – and he asked us to think about the best way to help him keep it.

Paraplanning is a relatively recent feature on the UK financial advice landscape. In fact, Richard Allum was an early pioneer of the profession, establishing the first outsourced paraplanning business in the UK in 2002. Today, he's the managing director of The Paraplanners.

Despite the growing population of paraplanners in the UK, opportunities for practitioners to gather together at events exclusively for them remained very rare. In his election pitch, Richard said he wanted to address this and ‘bring together practitioners, with a shared ambition and determination to pursue ever higher professional standards in financial advice’.

There was one catch: He didn’t want to appeal only to paraplanning members of the IFP. He wanted to bring together any paraplanners who were interested in taking part in the conversation.

How did we solve it?

We began by thinking about the idea of ‘bringing people together’ and ‘taking part in a conversation’, and the environments in which we might achieve that.

At the same time, we thought about the kind of people we wanted to take part. In contrast to the predominantly male and middle-aged complexion of the financial advice community, the paraplanning population tends to be younger - averaging 30 years of age - with a split of, perhaps, 60:40 in favour of women.

And then we realised that, since there was no precedent in UK financial services for staging a national event for such a young audience where there were more women than men, we may as well turn convention on its head.

We set out a simple ambition: To create an informal gathering designed by paraplanners for paraplanners to exchange views, learn things, fix things and share things. 

Taking inspiration from the unique qualities of the space created within teepees to act as a catalyst for conversation and cooperation in-the-round, we settled on the idea of stage an unconference event held in rolling countryside under open skies.

The event would only take place if there was an appetite among paraplanners to take part. So we threw the event open to practitioners and published a blog post to see if they wanted to join in.

They did. And the Paraplanners Powwow was born.

What did we do?

From the start, the Powwow organisation broke with all conventional approaches to event management and marketing communications that we’d experienced.

That’s because we applied unconference principles from the start - beginning with the adoption of online tools, like Typeform, to invite potential Powwow participants to determine the day, date and location for the event.

In fact, wherever the quality of a potential participant’s experience was likely to be affected, we invited them to contribute ideas or vote on suggestions; everything from deciding the topics up for discussion in the workshop sessions to their own selection of songs for the Powwow playlist that would be running throughout the day.

We designed and executed an event activation plan which included...

• Venue finding, site visits and selection
• Ticketing and accommodation management
• Hospitality coordination including menu specification
• Website build and content management
• Email and survey content coordination
• Teepee sourcing, selection and site coordination
• Sourcing and coordination of props, audiovisual support and event photography
• Signage and print management
• Public relations including news and social media management

As well as creating and coordinating the content and contributors for a six-hour event timetable, Richard set out on a mission to secure backing from supporters to help fund the event. We worked with Richard on sketching out a package for supporters and created a presentation pack for discussion which helped secure the support of AXA Wealth, Cofunds (now Aegon), Legal & General, Seven Investment Management and Transact.

What next?

More than 70 paraplanners attended the Paraplanners Powwow held on 19 September 2013 on farmland near Aynho, Northamptonshire.

• Successfully secured funding from five supporters to enable the staging of the event.
• The success of the format led to a proliferation of smaller regional Powwows in Leeds,

London, Nottingham and Manchester, which were independently organised by paraplanners but supported by the original Paraplanners Powwow.

These days, we like to think of the Powwow as the equivalent of the Parkrun for paraplanners. The way both movements have evolved is . You can read more about the evolution of the Powwow movement here.

These days, we like to think of the Powwow as the equivalent of the Parkrun for paraplanners. You can read more about the evolution of the Powwow movement here.