Amanda Baker, family offices, and Lily Louis, senior associate of product operations and strategy, break down how advisors can leverage events to generate opportunities for impact and client engagement.

by Amanda Baker and Lily Louis

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Key Points: 

• By providing unique and engaging experiences around sustainability that go beyond charts and numbers and into the experiential, advisors can leverage events as powerful tools for deepening relationships with clients and prospects. 
• Events offer not only opportunities to foster deeper client relationships but also more direct avenues for extending impact. By curating gatherings centered around sustainability, such as panels, dinners, and workshops, advisors can help their clients foster a deeper understanding of real world solutions for the issues they care about. 
• We also consider events as excellent mediums for amplifying the voices of our partners, catalyzing collaboration and forming networks of impact-focused individuals focused on building a better future. 

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At Ethic, bringing community together has always been a part of our company culture, whether at our headquarters in New York or visiting our partners across the country. As a result, we’ve helped firms discover how sustainability can play into their practice through not only  portfolio construction and reporting but also events. Over the past 9 years, we’ve hosted a variety of events centered around sustainability and impact that have allowed our advisors to deepen their connection with their clients. These have included intimate sustainability-focused dinners during which we work with sustainability-focused chefs and sommeliers or are hosted at farm-to-table restaurants. We have also hosted larger panel events where we’ve heard presentations from a wide range of experts across the issues reflected in our clients’ portfolios, from gender equity to sustainable agriculture. 

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When it comes to family offices, events can provide a particularly impactful opportunity for advisors to grow their business. Whether it’s a dinner or a panel, events allow firms to invite their clients and prospects to an engaging experience around sustainability that goes beyond charts and numbers and into the experiential. In our experience, the key to maximizing these opportunities lies in letting the theme of impact guide the event. We have done this by highlighting the ways to make a difference through personal behaviors, highlighting impact-focused brands in party favors, hearing from sustainability-focused chefs, and reflecting on values together. Events provide intimate ways to showcase all the different ways to have impact—from choosing which companies to support as a consumer to the foods with which to feed your family, and, of course, choosing to align investments with values. 

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Hosting an event with Ethic helps foster deeper relationships with clients and prospects through engaging around personal values and shared experiences. The opportunity is also helpful for advisors looking to grow their network and community, as they can invite a small group of prospects and encourage each to bring a friend. We’ve seen strong follow-up engagement with prospects after sharing time and connecting around values, and the learnings Ethic shares afterward are a helpful starting point for the advisor to kick off a lasting relationship. What’s more,  hosting a dinner with Ethic can be a great way for advisors looking to grow their brand as impact-focused to establish themselves in their community. 

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Here is one particularly delightful example. In February of this year, Ethic co-hosted a themed dinner with our partners at Caprock during which a group of 13 impact-driven women from the Seattle area came together for an interactive workshop to explore their values, share food, and connect with other women in their community. 

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Here’s what Nicki Northcott, client advisor at Caprock, had to say about the event: 

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“Partnering with Ethic on our Love & Legacy dinner was impactful on so many levels. Not only did the event strengthen my relationships with prospects, COIs and other community members, but it led to new relationships, and friendships, between attendees. The dinner was an amazing space for everyone to get curious about their values and how, through investing and otherwise, we can have impact."

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Events offer not only opportunities to foster deeper client relationships but also more direct avenues for extending impact. These gatherings serve as potent platforms for bringing together diverse communities that may not have intersected in the past. By curating this diverse guest list, advisors can help their clients foster cohesion across industries through connecting over shared values.

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Moreover, Ethic utilizes events to educate our clients on the issues they care most about and explore a myriad of solutions. Through engaging discussions, workshops, and presentations, attendees are empowered to confront challenges head on and explore innovative approaches to address them. This not only sparks dialogue but, ideally, also inspires tangible actions. Additionally, we aim to amplify the voices of our partners to inspire broader collaboration. We connect activists, sustainable chefs, and industry leaders, among others, to catalyze networks of change-makers, growing solidarity and collective agency in addressing complex global issues.

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How we define and achieve impact is informed by our experiences, our skill sets, and often our world views. There is no ‘right’ definition of impact or a single means to attain it. In fact, we need an entire toolkit of approaches to mitigate some of the great challenges facing humanity today. 

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Sustainability-centric events are another tool for advisors to both deepen relationships with clients and extend their impact.