Maximising the success of Medical Education events. It’s all in the planning.
If I was to ask you what are the key steps to planning a successful Medical Education event or campaign you’d probably say:
Selecting the right speaker
The right topic
The right venue
Getting the invites out
And a few other steps.
I did this exercise at a recent offsite with a team of Medical Affairs Advisors and the more I probed the longer the list was! I find it’s a great way to:
Get focused on what you are trying to accomplish
Highlight just how much work is involved
See the importance of planning ahead
Think back to the last time you planned a Medical Education event or campaign and ask yourself were you crystal clear on what you wanted the audience to walk away with or what impact you wanted that education to have on that behaviour?
In advance of the event be it a webinar or an all day congress did you look at how you could extend the reach of the event?
From what I have seen over the years and indeed from my own experience we can be so focused on getting the event or meeting out there that we sometimes forget the key piece - what is the impact we are trying to have?
To really achieve that you need to address this in the planning stage:
Get clear on your objectives and key results. What do you want people to take away from the meeting and what will the impact be?
Who is the real target audience?
What is the knowledge or behaviour gap you are trying to address?
How will you measure the success of the event. (No the number of attendees won’t cut it, this doesn’t show if you’ve achieved your objective).
What else can you do to extend the reach or impact of your message? Trust me your compliance team will love you if you think of this up front instead of trying to retroactively get approvals.
It’s why you need to carefully think about each step and make sure you plan in advance. You can’t plan for curveballs but you adapt and learn. Some of my most valuable learnings were from meetings that didn’t go quite to plan. (That’s a whole other article right there).
With so much to think about it can be overwhelming, especially when you have so many other priorities or maybe your marketing colleagues are asking you why the meeting is really needed.
That’s why I’m sharing this Free Planning for Success checklist outlining some of the key considerations to think about before, during and after your event. You can find it below.
