Strategic Intent:
To understand and evaluate attendee perceptions and satisfaction of large medical education meeting
Client Profile/Situation:
- Healthcare non-profit organization representing over 8,500 healthcare professionals
- The organization supports its members through education, research, advocacy and practice support.
- Largest revenue stream for the organization is the annual medical educational meeting necessary for members to receive continuing medical education credit
- Organization was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on the live meeting with no data proving return on investment of value-add programs
- Wholesale market research to understand attendee motivations, perceptions and satisfaction had never been performed
Key Issues and Barriers:
- Anecdotal evidence suggested poor attendee satisfaction with several expensive and key areas of the meeting, yet individual session evaluations indicated the opposite
- Future direction of live meetings industry-wide is in flux and the organization needed to stay ahead of possible trends to ensure financial viability
Key Implementation Components:
- Self-administered online data collection methodology
- Incentive was offered to secure a sufficient number of responses
Primary Results:
- Response rate was in the double digits which was well above the organization’s average response rate for smaller member polls, and provided a highly reliable statistical base
- Geographic breakdown of respondents was global and representative of attendee demographics
- Overall satisfaction with the meeting is relatively high, with a large majority of attendees reporting extremely or very satisfied.
Key strategic results:
- The data supported staff assumptions that attendees were overall very satisfied with the meeting
- Providing meeting content online after the live meeting—an expensive value-add program for meeting attendees—is perceived as very valuable to attendees
- Study uncovered low perceived value of membership benefits, which was a separate strategic initiative previously uncoupled with the meeting
Conclusions:
- Changes would not be made to educational content, nor would new value-add programs be introduced. Instead, the organization needed to more effectively promote current offerings to attendees, before, during and post-meeting
- More resources would be allocated to online initiatives to continue to meet attendee expectations
- Organization would continue to monitor attendee satisfaction and perceived value through annual market research
- Benefits of membership would be more clearly conveyed and highlighted during the meeting to convert non-member attendees