The investment trust sector has been under pressure for years, from continued wealth manager consolidation to boards now focusing on how to become more visible to retail investors. Discounts have narrowed, but that hasn’t solved the deeper problem: many trusts remain invisible to the very investors who could support them. The people who understand this best, the board members and senior marketing professionals dealing with it daily, have had no dedicated space to think it through together. Hub and Quill PR set out to create that space: one where board members get direct access to sharp marketing thinking, and the sector can work through its shared challenges together, rather than each trust solving them alone.
The Blueprint Sessions is an invitation-only lunchtime series for board members and senior marketing professionals working in investment trusts. Each session brings together a small group of around twelve people for a light lunch, three short talks, and an open discussion, held at Hub’s offices in London.
The format is deliberately intimate. Twelve seats. A focused theme. Speakers drawn from across the investment trust ecosystem: fund managers, marketing leaders, sector analysts, PR strategists, and specialist contributors from behavioural science, governance, and digital. The conversation that follows the talks is as important as the talks themselves, because the people in the room are the ones with the most direct experience of the problems being discussed.
Sessions run every six to eight weeks, with each one building on the thinking established in previous editions. The themes are chosen to address the questions the sector is actively grappling with: how to build brand visibility and recall in a crowded market, how to reach retail investors who have never heard of investment trusts, how to use PR as a tool for discount management, how behavioural science should change the way trusts communicate, and what the shift to AI-powered search means for investor visibility and conversion.
Every session generates original content: a long-form article, an email, and a LinkedIn post that extends the thinking beyond the room to the wider investment trust marketing community.
The investment trust sector’s discount problem is not only a performance problem or a structural problem. It is, in significant part, a communications problem. Share buybacks address supply. They do not create demand. Building demand requires sustained investment in brand, storytelling, earned media, and digital visibility: the disciplines that have historically been treated as secondary to investment management in the sector’s hierarchy of priorities.
The Blueprint Sessions exist to make the case for those disciplines, rigorously and practically, to the people with the authority and the motivation to act on them. Board members who need to understand what marketing can and cannot do. Marketing directors who need to make the case to their boards. Communications professionals who are working to close the gap between what investment trusts are and what the retail market understands them to be.
The aim is not to produce reports or recommendations for a shelf. It is to build a community of practice: a group of senior investment trust professionals who are thinking seriously about the sector’s marketing and communications challenges, sharing what is working, and raising the standard of what good looks like.
Invitations are extended exclusively to board members of investment trusts and senior marketing and communications professionals working within the sector. Places are limited to twelve per session. There is a waitlist once sessions are full.
The exclusivity is intentional. The value of the Blueprint Sessions depends on the seniority and candour of the people in the room. Attendees speak openly because they are speaking to peers who understand the context, the constraints, and the stakes.
Each session gives attendees access to original, evidence-based thinking on the questions that matter most to their work, presented by practitioners and specialists who understand the investment trust context specifically. Not generic marketing advice applied to financial services, but thinking developed for the sector and tested against it.
Attendees leave with a clearer framework for the challenge in front of them, practical tools and approaches they can apply directly, and a network of senior peers who are working on the same problems. The open discussion format means that the insight flows both ways: as much comes out of the room as goes into it.
For board members, the sessions provide a structured way to understand what marketing, PR, and digital visibility can realistically contribute to discount management, capital raises, and long-term investor confidence. For marketing and communications professionals, they provide external validation, new frameworks, and the kind of peer perspective that is difficult to find anywhere else in the sector.
Investment trusts have spent a long time being described as the best-kept secret in financial services. That phrase is meant as a compliment. It is also an admission. The product performs. The story doesn’t travel.
Closing that gap is not a peripheral activity. It is one of the most important strategic challenges facing the sector. The Blueprint Sessions are where that work gets done, in a room with the people who have the most to contribute to it and the most to gain from getting it right.
To register your interest in attending a future session: hubagency.co.uk/contact-us
