The Digital Era

IT’S ALL ABOUT CONTENT …AND ALL ABOUT YOU

At the Actuaries magazine, our focus has always been on providing relevant, high quality timely content to our members.

KEEPING UP WITH THE PACE OF CHANGE

Over time our monthly hardcopy format has started to challenge our ability to deliver timely content with articles taking at least two months to go from conception to print.

One facet of this has been that practice committees have developed separate newsletters to communicate more rapidly with their members. We expect that the issues we face as actuaries working in our respective industries will continue to increase in pace, leaving the current magazine format very much behind the curve.

CONTINUOUS CYCLE

At the start of 2015, we will move away from a monthly cycle to a continuous cycle. As well as allowing for immediate publishing of articles on the issues of the day, we will no longer be restricted to numbers of pages or word limits for our articles. We can have as much content as is necessary to provide insight and quality reporting that each topic deserves. We can dispense with words entirely and use videos, audio recordings, visual presentations and other formats to provide exciting and interactive content to our members. We will also channel through relevant content from other sources on a daily basis.

DESIGN BRIEF

Our new website for the magazine is well on the way. The design reflects our connection with the Actuaries Institute, but also reflects the dynamic and interactive future of the magazine. Members will be able to comment and like articles. Anyone will be able to sign up for weekly emails summarising new content. And for those of us who like that sort of thing, we’ve made it super easy to share content on social media. For the rest of us, that means it’ll be easy to forward an email to a colleague with a great article you just saw that’s relevant to what the company’s doing.

VISION

When you arrive at your desk, or pick up your laptop to begin a day’s work, we want to be the first website you visit to catch up with the news, see who has commented on your article, or catch up on the latest questions your practice committee wants feedback on.

And we have an even greater ambition for our website – we want to be the first port of call for people working in the industries we serve as actuaries. We want to be a platform for actuaries to showcase their talent and thought leadership for their industries. We want to do our part in promoting brand actuary.

PRINT COPIES

At the start of 2014 we asked members to opt-in if they wanted to continue to receive the magazine in hardcopy, and only 420 of 4516 members did that. Today, most of our readers come to us from our monthly email.

IT’S STILL ABOUT CONTENT

No matter how many bells and whistles, like buttons and comment boxes we add to our website, nothing will be as effective in reaching our vision as having high-quality relevant content.

The practice committees have agreed to be responsible for content in their areas and each practice committee will have an editor on the magazine editorial committee.

Thought-leaders in the industry have agreed to contribute on a regular basis to the website. This includes actuarial and other consulting firms.

We will publish a news feed that links into relevant articles from the mainstream press. There will be synopses and summaries of relevant research plus commentary on current industry issues.

We expect (and hope) that members will make full use of the commenting facility to provide thoughtful and constructive commentary on articles. We will moderate out any comments that are not consistent with the high quality we wish to promote.

Now that you have read about our plans, share your feedback and tell us what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

CPD: Actuaries Institute Members can claim two CPD points for every hour of reading articles on Actuaries Digital.