From Strength to Strength: The BCI in 2025
As 2025 draws to a close, we take a look back at a highly active and successful year for the BCI. A strong financial performance and new major projects in the pipeline place us in a strong position to better serve the resilience community and to share valuable, impactful content in innovative and engaging ways in 2026.
BCI World Hybrid 2025 was a standout success, demonstrating how large-scale hybrid events can be delivered with impact, innovation and inclusivity.
2025’s most notable achievements
Here are some of the specific projects achieved by the BCI:
Education and training - the learning team
- We trained more than 1,900 practitioners across nearly 100 countries
- We launched a new Specialism Course: Crisis Communications
- We translated the online CBCI examination into French, Spanish & Arabic
- We implemented a new Learning Management System (LMS) to enhance the learner experience
- We welcomed five new Licensed Training Partners over the year, and we look forward to growing those relationships
Membership
The BCI now has over 10,000 members worldwide and the Membership team supported 100 Chapter, SIG, and Forum events. We issued over 2,200 Credly Credentials this year, over 200 grades have been awarded in 2025, and we also welcomed 327 non-certified members.
The total number of events and meetings for Groups in 2025 was 164, consisting of:
- 73 virtual events
- 21 physical events
- 8 Hybrid events
- 60 Committee meetings
- 2 Leadership Essential webinars
Thought Leadership
It was a rich year for the Thought Leadership team. Education Month delivered informative training sessions and exercises, regional insights, and mentoring webinars—all focused on advancing professional development. These are the highlights from the year:
- 13,398 report downloads
- 25 report launches and other webinars
- Six new white papers released
- 175 news/articles published
- Over 1,200 survey responses from all over the world
- Over 80 interviews were conducted for BCI’s research programme
- Introduced a new form of content: infographics, enabling practitioners to quickly grasp key insights at a glance and easily share evidence-based messages with the resilience community
- The BCI’s ‘Operational Resilience Report 2025’ was the most downloaded report
Events
- 289 Regional Award entries were submitted this year
- 58 Regional and 18 Global Award winners were recognised for their outstanding contributions this year.
- Six virtual BCI Regional Award ceremonies were delivered and a Global physical event in London
- BCI World enjoyed a full house, welcoming 450 delegates, alongside a strong virtual audience of 350 online participants
- The programme introduced new session formats, including an unconference session and PechaKucha presentations
- Headset-enabled sessions were another first at the conference. The overall programme supported accessibility, sustainability and delegate wellbeing
- Four live-streamed keynote sessions and nearly 40 breakout sessions captured key discussions, many with accessible live captions
Looking ahead to 2026
"2025 has been a highly active and successful year for the BCI as the list of our achievements above demonstrates. From my perspective the key challenge myself and the team faced this year was in delivering a strong financial performance to make up for last year’s deficit. I’m pleased to report that we were able to deliver a record surplus in financial year 2024/25. This has enabled us to add significantly to our cash reserves.
Why is this important for a not-for-profit organization that exists purely to serve its members? The answer to this lies in our ambition to completely re-define the way we interact with you all. Throughout the year we have been scoping and planning for a major project: the complete overhaul of our Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Content Management System (CMS). This will join the Learning Management System (LMS) that came online earlier in the year. Together they will allow us to understand and meet member needs and share content with you so much more effectively.
We are now at the stage of signing off on these projects and starting work on what will be a project lasting up to two years until completion. It is estimated the final cost of the project will be in the region of £500,000, hence the need for a strong performance to help us maintain our cash reserves at a prudent level. We’ll be keeping you updated as we progress with the project.
Another source of great satisfaction to me in the year was BCI World 2025. It was fantastic to leave the Leonardo Hotel, its base over the last 5 years, on such a high – the best conference we have delivered since before the pandemic and we are now moving to a new venue to help us bring it back up to pre-pandemic levels. We have some great ideas for the conference in 2026 and even bigger ones for 2027.
Building on this momentum, we are excited to take BCI World Hybrid to Convene Sancroft St Paul’s next year, offering even greater opportunities to evolve and enhance the delegate experience.
With new courses coming onstream early in 2026 along with a landmark collaboration in the USA 2025 has given us solid foundations to step ahead and achieve our vision for the Institute."
David Thorp, Executive Director
