Viewpoint A


Melissa Harrison explores what might happen with events due to COVID-19, and gives insight into the FPA’s plans


S MANY of you will have no doubt noticed, COVID-19 has caused some significant problems that are affecting


the events industry. With the FPA as a leader in the fire sector for providing quality events, I mentioned to the editor that it may be a timely opportunity for me to write a few words for our journal to update you on the things we are doing to keep our events department busy, and how we can continue to share our expertise.


FPA webinars


For several years now the FPA has been delivering successful, well attended free webinars (which are all available on demand in your member area). We have increased the frequency of the number of webinars we deliver to at least one per month, and we have also increased the capacity of our software from 500 people in attendance to 1,000 – for our recent webinar on fire doors, not only did we reach this capacity, but we also delivered it on two occasions, as it was so popular!


Speaker opportunities


The global pandemic has unsurprisingly freed up some of our many fire safety experts – this left us with a good opportunity to make use of their time. In this month alone, our principal consultants and managing director are presenting to audiences at three different online external events, looking at diverse topics including COVID-19 and what happens to the sector now; compartmentation; and the building regulations review. Many of these speaker events bring you a unique opportunity to hear from experts who have been directly involved with the working groups in government, and we are delighted to continue working alongside various other organisations such as the Fire Sector Federation, the Association for Specialist Fire Protection and the Fire Industry Association to bring intellectual content to you.


4 JUNE 2020 www.frmjournal.com Digital events


This is a relatively new field of work for the FPA, and we are now actively planning two of our first big digital events. Since our last laboratory open day in 2017, not only have the laboratory’s capabilities increased significantly, but equally there is much more interest in legislation and standards, as well as the true competency of systems, materials and people. Whilst many of us are working digitally, this


situation presents a great opportunity to showcase our expertise to you, and we are working on a virtual lab open day for later this year. This would give you exclusive access to test burns, an understanding of how standards are applied, a lab walkaround, and examples of the type of manual training we can provide and the range of sectors we are now working with. Alongside this, one of my personal favourite


events – and our flagship conference – is the Fire Sector Summit, planned to take place in November at the QE2 Conference Centre in London. At this stage, it is really too difficult to predict with any accuracy what we will be doing in four months’ time. However, in the realistic scenario that public gatherings are still not advised, we are working on delivering the excellent content of the Summit to you in a series of TED-style digital talks, so that you don’t miss out on your continuing professional development, or on hearing from the sector’s key decision makers.


Member events


Knowing how valued our regional member events are, we also don’t want you to lose out on the interaction and benefits these events provide as part of your FPA membership. We are working on a new initiative for our members to engage with as they return to work, which will run in a similar fashion to an online forum – we hope to be able to release a date for you soon, when you can sign up to a live Q&A session and ask our experts about issues that are concerning you in the current climate.


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