An annual tradition in the financial advisory community has been put on hold.

For years, advisors and other industry participants have looked forward to the annual Advocis national conference as an opportunity to meet colleagues from across the country, attend educational seminars, network and catch up on industry news — not to mention the golf tournaments, dinners and concerts. But Advocis has announced that its 2006 national conference, held in Victoria in June, was the organization’s last — at least, for the next few years.

“We found the national conference to be a distraction,” says Steve Howard, president of Advocis, Canada’s largest association of financial advisors. “It was competing with other successful events that were happening in other parts of the organization.”

The conference was competing with the association’s own Advocis Schools, a series of summer education courses held in four locations across the country.

“It’s a struggle to fly everybody in and run events and promote them,” Howard says. “Basically, we were taking one revenue stream and dividing it into two parts. Some members were deciding to go to the schools, and some were deciding to go to the conference. Very few, if any, were deciding to go to both.”

The schools, according to Howard, are profitable, while the national conference operated at a loss, albeit a small one.

Advocis’s annual general meeting, the key component of the national conference, will be incorporated into other Advocis events. The 2007 AGM, for example, will be held as part of Advocis’s Banff school next summer.

Advocis Schools are held in resort settings in Kelowna, B.C.; Banff, Alta.; Alliston, Ont.; and Roseneath, P.E.I., every summer. Over the course of three or four days, each school offers courses in such topics as insurance, financial planning, tax planning and practice management. The seminars are similar to those covered at the conferences, and, in some cases, are presented by the same people. The schools are promoted as an opportunity for advisors to gain professional development credits and enjoy summer activities, such as canoeing and golf.

“We just connect the AGM to an already successful event,” Howard says. “The Banff school delivers all the same components that were delivered at our national conference. It’s just that they were, in effect, competing with each other for the members’ attention.”

Of the 1,000 delegates who attended this year’s national conference, between 400 and 500 attended specifically for the education portion, Howard estimates. In the absence of a national conference, he expects that many of those will enrol in an Advocis Schools program. And, as more advisors attend the schools, the schools can expand their programs.

“The only thing that stops the Banff school, the Ontario school or the Kelowna school from having the same content as the national conference is the number of attendees,” Howard says. “As we augment those events with more attendees, then they can have a broader program.”

The Banff program, established in the 1950s to serve the life insurance industry — but now accommodating the planning and investment side as well — is the most popular; 300 advisors attended this year’s program in August. At the Okanagan school in Kelowna, attendance was slightly less than 200. The Ontario and Atlantic schools each drew between 100 and 200 attendees. With no national conference to compete with next year, Howard expects attendance will increase.

Prior to the merger that created Advocis in 2002, there were two large annual advisor association conferences, each group descending upon a different city each year. The Canadian Association of Financial Planners held its conference in the spring, followed by the Canadian Association of Insurance and Financial Advisors’ event in the fall. The May 2002 CAFP conference in Edmonton included a raucous, emotional general meeting in which delegates ultimately voted to merge with CAIFA, effectively marking the demise of the CAFP. The merger was subsequently ratified at the CAIFA conference held in Ottawa the following September.

In addition to the business of AGMs, education seminars and exhibits, the events included gala dinners, concerts and parties — some held by organizers as part of the conference; others hosted privately by sponsors. AIM Funds Management Inc. ’s parties at CAFP and, later, Advocis conferences were typically the most in-demand tickets of the event — until they were discontinued in 2005. The AIM parties featured performances by bands such as Blue Rodeo, 54/40 and Great Big Sea.

@page_break@The CAIFA conference in Saskatoon in 2000 included a concert by Burton Cummings; and acrobats wowed delegates at the 2001 CAFP conference in Montreal.

Advocis doesn’t plan to kill its national conferences entirely. “We will still have national conferences,” Howard says. “The conferences may be every two, three or five years.” IE