Welfare Call Forum: Give us your views
For the last two years, we have been unable to host our annual forums (usually hosted in Leeds and central London in November) due to the impact which COVID has had. Instead, we have hosted and conducted a series of webinars covering a wide variety of topics e.g. new system developments, training, Ofsted support, customer-led demonstration etc in order to communicate with you on a regular basis.
With COVID all of us have had to change our working styles and routines, with working from home and hybrid working models now almost becoming the norm. However, now that COVID restrictions have eased we have had a number of authorities asking if we are planning to reintroduce our live face-to-face forums again.
Therefore, we’d like to take this opportunity to gain feedback from you all to understand:
- Whether you would prefer to attend a face-to-face conference or whether our remote program of webinars suits you better
- (If you would prefer a face-to-face conference) Are you happy with it being held during November (as we previously did) or would you prefer it to take place at a different point in the year (we would have to be mindful of it not clashing with the NAVSH conference)
- What would you want to achieve from a face-to-face conference?
- What key topics/areas would you want us to cover?
We realise that authorities are still making cuts and some authorities are not being allowed expenditure to travel – this coupled with the online working and video conference/MS Teams meetings means we do have mixed views as to the best approach.
Dependent on feedback and numbers we are considering the following:
- Live forum, where we all meet face to face and hire a venue
- Online forum, where we could bring in speakers and possibly have break-out rooms
- Continuation of the online webinars, scattered throughout the year covering a wide variety of subject matters. You pick and choose which ones you go to. The duration of these webinars is usually one hour
We would love to hear your thoughts! Please provide feedback on any or all of the above points through your allocated account manager or via [email protected]