Participants, Peter Elias, Nancy Finn John Grohol, John Hoben, Danny Sands Mark Reifsteck, Peggy Zuckerman

Minutes: Approved

Update of Strategic Initiatives

Membership Mark Reifsteck

Member Recruitment

The membership team is sending out a letter by May 1 to all members asking them to solicit one other person to become a member and stating the benefits of SPM membership. We discussed whether to create incentives to encourage members to bring in other new members and how we will track referrals from members who are successful in signing up new members, using a member referral form.

From the Linked In social network we have identified 1,770 individuals who have signed up for the SPM group.  Of those, 1500 are not members of SPM.   The membership team will be setting up a schedule to send frequent messages to recruit members from this pool of individuals who are interested in participatory medicine.We also have 2,204 likes. on our public Facebook page and will do a similar campaign to get them to join the Society. The membership team is also going back to solicit individuals who were members of the Society and who have dropped out.

Member Retention

The membership team is developing a strategy to help get members involved in the organization, and is working on rewriting our value proposition to that end.
We discussed the question of raising membership fees and setting up a tiered dues structure?  No decisions were made.

External Communication, Danny Sands

Dave and Eric are working with Nancy Finn to pull together an external communication project plan.

Curriculum for Patient Engagement, Peter Elias

We have just about finished our work on curriculum development requested by Johns Hopkins and will submit what we have done, which will hopefully result in recognition for the Society.

We are  beginning to develop  a larger curriculum project in participatory medicine and need to make decisions about who this course will be aimed at. The choices are: medical students, residents,  all medical professionals, patients.  This could also involve partnerships with other organizations.

Conference Alliances and Visibility Programs, Donna and Danny

We are planning a gathering at Health Datapolooza in Washington D.C.,  May 8-11, 2016.

Internal Communication: John Hoben

We have volunteer editors for the next 13 months of newsletters.   Some of the key themes will include best practices in participatory medicine and palliative care
Internal communication is looking for ideas on how to fund a new website for SPM.
We will continue to offer the Listserv to our members as a key way to communicate with one another, but it is a consensus of the Executive Committee that we need to have a better long-term solution to enable us to engage in threaded discussions that will build communities within our membership.  The Internal Communication team is examining alternative platforms to make this happen.