Pride forum spins out of LPL Focus with three sponsors attached

The 2027 LPL Pride Advisor Forum, run by advisors in the firm's Pride Advisor Network, has three sponsors attached—Lincoln Financial, Nationwide and Goldman Sachs—before it has a venue or dates. The gathering turned a four-hour Pride event ahead of this year's Focus conference in San Diego, which drew more than 100 LGBTQ advisors and allies, and an offsite Pride Advisor Happy Hour into a conference of its own. Marci Bair, founder of San Diego-based Bair Financial Planning, said she and about a half dozen other organizers had talked for several years about a dedicated event for LGBTQ advisors and allies; the network will settle dates and location in coming months.

Bair's account of what that session produced reads like practice-building: attendees came away with much more confidence about how to work with the gay community and "some planning things to be aware of, some terminology to be aware of"—the vocabulary a niche practice trades in. Advisors also approached her to say they had never been to a Pride-related event in their years in the industry; a room of 100-plus advisors who mostly don't know one another is, before anything else, a referral list. Bair's view is that LPL "leaned in" while many companies "have gone away from supporting their diverse advisors," one organizer's read, not a survey.

One sponsor name is worth a second look: Goldman Sachs has spent this year building a custody offer for RIAs, which this publication has argued amounts to a product rather than a platform; sponsoring an advisor-run event is a cheap way to become a familiar name in a channel the firm is still new to. The organizers put it more simply—three firms wrote checks to reach a room of more than 100 advisors.

The forum joins a short roster of LGBTQ-focused industry gatherings: the Raymond James Pride Financial Advisors Network Symposium, Out in Finance, the Financial Planning Association's PridePlanners Knowledge Circle and the National Gay and Lesbian Chamber of Commerce. Financial Planning, which first reported the LPL plan, calls that set a small handful. The market case is already made: a four-hour session filled a room of more than 100 advisors, and three sponsors funded the audience before anyone had picked a venue. Affinity programming lives on sponsorship budgets, not HR budgets.

Laura LaTourette, who helped build the network before leaving LPL to run Family Wealth Management Group in Dahlonega, Georgia, is less romantic about the terrain: the working environment, she said, "changes in different ways, but it's always been volatile for us." Belonging and visibility still help the business, in her telling, and she called watching her former colleagues pull this off "really exciting," adding that she is no longer there. Watch the sponsor list when the dates land. Three renewals would leave the forum a modest sponsor-funded gathering; a fourth or fifth name would mean the vendor community now budgets for this segment the way it budgets for every other conference on the calendar.