Chair of the IFoA’s Management Board Grahame Stott explores how your response to our annual IFoA member survey helps to improve your member experience and can lead to real benefits for your career.
Over the course of my career, IFoA membership has served me very well. But, as Chair of the Board overseeing the operation of the IFoA and holding the Executive accountable, I acknowledge that there’s always room for improvement.
And I also acknowledge that it hasn’t always felt to all of our members like the IFoA is everything they hoped for from their professional body. Since 2018, through our annual member surveys and other feedback channels, we have been listening and some of you have told us that:
The IFoA has made great efforts to enhance its understanding of the wider membership to support better strategic decision making, establishing a programme of ‘insight’ development. This includes, alongside the annual member survey:
We’ve learnt that you are remarkably self-reliant, hard-working, ambitious, and proud of meeting the highest standards. You also have an ongoing appetite for learning that your employers don’t always support.
The Executive analyses and agonises over all the outputs of this programme, but of course higher-level reports emerging from these exercises are also regularly presented to the Management Board. You can well imagine that this panel of (mostly) actuaries relish getting their teeth into these data!
Our role, of course, is to query the data and how the Executive has acted upon it.
The IFoA is in the middle of a major member experience transformation. Based on your feedback, the IFoA has over just a few short years:
We are not finished. We know there is still more to do. We are committed to a continuous cycle of improvement and have exciting plans for 2023, including the launch of digital communities and a new member portal.
So you can see that your input really does translate into action.
Of course, the robustness of the IFoA’s insight depends upon your participation. Our 2021 full-length member survey saw a response rate of 12.5% of the membership, while our 2020 short survey reached 18.5%.
These are respectable sample sizes for such market research. But there’s always room for improvement!
The survey is very short – just 3 minutes – so it couldn’t be easier to contribute to the insight on which we base our decisions. We want to know what you think about the progress we have made and what we still need to improve upon. And we want to hear from as many members as possible.
You should already have received an email link coming from membersurvey@actuaries.org.uk. Reminders are sent out weekly while the survey remains open.
If you haven’t already done so, please complete the survey before it closes on 6 December 2022.
We need your input and feedback to ensure we deliver those enhancements which are most important to our members.
For every response to the 2022 member survey completed before 6pm GMT on 6 December 2022, the IFoA will donate £1 to the IFoA Foundation.
