2021: Developing our membership's ability to succeed
Equipping, supporting and developing our membership to be competitive and successful both nationally and internationally.
By offering high quality educational opportunities and thought leadership, as well as promoting the value of IP and the role our members play in protecting it, we have helped our members to continue to be successful.
Events
In 2021, we offered our members a broad range of online events, focused on building key skills and keeping members up to speed in our quickly changing profession.
We have continued to increase our volume and range of webinars, with a total of 6,584 delegates attending our 28 webinars in 2021. In 2020, we saw 5,320 delegates attend 22 webinars.
In addition to our webinar programme, we have also expanded our learning and growth opportunities to serve our members’ development needs.
Across our events programme, there were 7,223 delegates to 34 events in 2021. For comparison our annual report in 2019 reported 3,800 delegates to 42 events. Despite having no in person events, we are delighted at the growth in engagement that we have seen.
Equipping new formalities colleagues
In November 2021, we launched a new course for formalities staff with less than six months’ experience, offering a solid foundational understanding.
This course is delivered online and on demand, providing firms with a flexible option for training and confidence building.
We had 111 students enrol on the course during 2021.
The course content was developed and reviewed by CITMA Paralegal Committee members, and the production was supported by an e-learning consultancy.
Communications
We set out to inform and engage members with our content in a greater volume than we have before.
To achieve this, we had a target to provide more informative, thought leading and engaging content for our members than we have in any previous year.
By publishing a range of news articles on practice matters, features that provide analysis and bring colour to our membership, and supportive articles around important topics such as mental health and diversity, we were able to engage a bigger proportion of our members with relevant content that we have done before.
CITMA Review, our magazine, continued to be published both in print and in full online to ensure it was accessible to all.
In was not just our written content that our members were drawn to. A total of 1,199 hours’ CPD were earned by members watching online recordings of webinars and other educational events.
More than two thirds of our members engaged in our content in 2021. This is best demonstrated by the fact that 65% of our members clicked on at least one piece of content within our email newsletter in 2021. Our email newsletter remains the main way our members see content from us.
Promoting our members
We use content to engage with business owners who might use the service of a Chartered Trade Mark Attorney to help direct them to our members’ services.
By providing topical content on interesting stories we have attracted people onto our website to provide insight into the value of properly protected IP. From there, users are going on to explore our other content and ultimately, in some cases, search for a Chartered Trade Mark Attorney.
Our trade mark informational videos were watched for a total of 53 hours and our blogs saw a 9% rise in views, being read more than 28,000 times.
This resulted in more contacts made via our Find a Chartered Trade Mark Attorney tool – a total of 8,256, representing a 13% increase.