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