Get set to use everything in your membership in 2025

Newsletter: Nearly time for this year’s President’s Conference

Get everything you can from your membership

Your events, training and resources

There’s less than two weeks until President’s Conference, so make sure you register if you haven’t already.

There is so much going on, not least preparations for the General Election.

Even more reason to join us in Birmingham. In person connections and dynamics are different. President’s Conference will spark ideas, give you solid, practical support for your innovation and modernisation agendas and create connections you can call on.

As it’s half-term for lots of us, just two top things for you today

1. Free training with Microsoft is back in June

Change Agent Manager offers an overview of the key skills needed to be an effective change agent – with a strong emphasis on the ability to lead change. Register now so you can take part on Thursday 20 and Friday 21 June.

2. Don’t forget mentoring – you’ve got till November

Join the group of people volunteering in 2024’s free mentoring programme. Not sure it’s for you? Register for the Magic of Mentoring webinar with guest host Mary McDowall (co-founder of Learning Solutions Matter) on Friday 7 June for all the details.

Take care. I hope you’re able to have a great weekend.

Best wishes,

Alex.

Illustration of a woman reading an oversized book, entitled, 'Local gov's big book of ideas'.

In Your Resource Hub

Digital Trends 2024: Previous years

An overview of digital trends reports from the past five years. Revisiting predictions from 2019 onwards, we evaluate our hits and misses.

Making predictions is always a tricky business – ‘guess correctly three times in a row, and you can be considered an expert’, or so they say.

We look at our success in accurately identifying trends in our last five years of reports (from 2019).

ICYMI Collaboration, innovation, and connectivity: a policy focus

With the pace of change is only accelerating, the coming together of collaboration, innovation, and connectivity has never been more critical. These three pillars are the foundation of driving progress. 

Get support in creating positive changes with research and practical examples and start to create better places.

Socitm Says: Generative AI
Listen to Sam Nutt (LOTI) and Kurt Frary (Norfolk) talk the dynamic relationship between (GenAI) and local government.

You might have missed…

Catch up with last week’s webinars: Accessibility Week: the summary
Check your regional Teams channels for copies of the presentations.

For ease of viewing, the recordings are divided into easy to navigate chapters, with subtitles and transcript available via the video player toolbar.

You will need a user account on socitm.net to access member-only resources. Let us know if need any support.

Leadership Academy Alumni 2023

Training

There are 3 more Empowering Women courses this year. Find the one nearest to you and register.

How was your course? Tell us about it 🙂

Virtual workshops

In-person programmes

Training places are included in your organisational membership – subject to availability and membership level. If you have any questions or would like further information, please email the training team.

People make places. President's Conference 12-13 June 2024.

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to feel inspired, connected, and equipped to deal with whatever the future holds. There’s a terrific range of presenters but the people you sit next to during the day and at the evening gala dinner will be just as helpful.

A group of men and one woman dressed in walking gear. They are all standing in a car park with the bottom of a hill in the background behind two minibuses.

The Public Sector Challenge

Local government is always up for a challenge, but the last few years have been more challenging than most. Annually we are asking the public sector to come together by taking on a challenge and by doing so raise money for Cancer Research UK.

This year we’re tackling the Yorkshire Three Peaks – a 24-mile assent in 12 hours on Friday 6 September.

Join over 500 participants from across the public sector, including Socitm.

National conference Sheffield 2024

Events

Member-only meetings

Meet people for catching-up, problem sharing (and solving) and great networking.

Free webinars and meetings hosted by Socitm

Free webinars and events hosted by partners and others

Missed a webinar? Past recordings are available to watch in the resource hub.

Webinars are open to anyone in the public sector, membership is not necessary, so please do share them with your network.

Come and say hello

  • Thursday 20 June: LCG Net Zero 2024 [Birmingham]
    VP Yogita Popat (Director of Culture and Sustainability at the London Borough of Barnet) is on the 14:00 panel Mapping carbon footprint and discovering data-bank building tools
  • Tuesday 24 September: DigiGov Expo [London]
    Join Nadira Hussain, President Mark Lumley and Sam Smith
    • Nadira is chairing the Citizen Experience stream. In which, at 15:25, Mark (Director of ICT and Digital at London Borough of Hounslow) is a panellist on Data-Driven Collaboration: Transforming governance through strategic partnerships and enhanced data sharing
    • Sam is a panellist in the GovICT stream at 15:10 for Driving Transformation through an Effective Strategy: The pillars needed to achieve success

Microsoft MOU Briefing

Following the written briefings shared with the sector to date regarding ongoing CCS negotiations with Microsoft on the new MOU, the LGA is inviting you to an update briefing with CCS to discuss negotiation progress, input sector views and questions.

The briefing will take place on Friday 7 June from 09:00 to 10:00.

Agenda
09:00 to 09:05 Welcome and introductions from the LGA
09:05 to 09:20 Update presentation with Steve Hopkins from CCS
09:20 to 09:55 Q&A and discussion
09:55 to 10:00 Closing remarks from the LGA

In light of the significant financial burden councils face with Microsoft licenses, this will be an opportunity to hear directly from CCS.

Register directly for this briefing or email cyberanddigital@local.gov.uk for more information.

Thank you for reading (or scrolling) this far! Just one more thing…

A friend picked my son up from holiday club yesterday and in talking to him about work I raved about Bruce Daisley! I shared his deck about Work in 2024 a couple of weeks ago so today it’s the turn of his Presence presentation 🙂

Presence by Bruce Daisley
…If teams are going to be more than the sum of their parts then understanding and empathising with each other is critical….

Photo by Catherine Hughes on Unsplash