Participants: Donna Cryer, Nick Dawson, Peter Elias, Nancy Finn, Eric Glazer, Joe Graedon, Terry Graedon, John Grohol, Sarah Krug, Danny Sands, Josh Seidman, Charlie Smith, Joe Ternullo, Jon Wald, Peggy Zuckerman
New Executive Committee
o President Jon Wald
o Immediate Past President Nick Dawson
o President Elect Joseph Ternullo
o Secretary Nancy Finn
o Treasurer John Grohol
o Members-Âat-ÂLarge Peggy Zuckerman and Peter Elias
o Board Co-Chairs Dave deBronkart, Danny Sands
o Acting Executive Director Sarah Krug
Committee Progress Reports
Internal Communications, Nancy Finn
We have established a monthly newsletter which has been well received by the membership. John Hoben and Mayank Agarwal are the tireless, talented newsletter staff who collect all of the articles, do the video interviews, write, edit, format and prepare the newsletter for publication. They are a great team.
Our listserv continues to thrive and is used by a large subset of our members on many interesting issues. Unfortunately there is no easy way to save these threads and make them available to everyone.
We also discussed how to encourage our members to be more active on our SPM Facebook page, and post their accomplishments and thoughts. Recurring notices in the newsletter reminding members about the Facebook page will help.
We talked about reinstating the Hoop La Forums. Nancy will connect with last year’s members-at-large Ileana Balcu and Carla Berg who wrote recommendations and an analysis after leading that initiative for over a year.
Our first Wireside Chat, which ran into some technical issues, engendered a good discussion among the members who were able to join. We are planning to continue the Wireside chats on a new platform that will not have restrictions on the numbers of individuals who can participate.
External Communication, Donna Cryer
Since the last board meeting we were fortunate to have a student intern from Tufts Medical School, recommended by SPM member Lisa Gualtieri, Professor Health Communications Program, Tufts Medical School. She completed an audit of our digital and media properties. The results are as follows:
1. Our branding is consistent across all of our platforms.
2. We need to do more in social media and with video
3. An updated and streamlined website that includes search engine optimization should be a priority
4. We need to do a better job of curating and highlighting what each of the members are doing (Learning Exchange)
Among the priorities that we have set as a result of the study are:
1. Establish better tweet chats and google hangouts.
2. Determine who is running our twitter feed; who runs the blog? – We need to formalize that – find an intern or individual to curate our content, that we are already generating, and feed it into Twitter.
3. Explore and strengthen partnerships including Consumer Reports so they can reinforce our messages and include in their communications.
4. Increase number of clinicians who are committed to engaging patients in PM style via a PM badge- Seal program.
5. Engage in an active external communication program that will help increase our membership, media mentions, and inbound requests for speakers .
6. Collect and advertise information on where all of are members are speaking and leading conference sessions.
Donna may have an intern who can work with us on social media. She will let us know when that is finalized.
At the Connected Health Symposium we collected a list of prospects who we will need to follow up to persuade them to join the organization. We need more people who can help with this.
We now have a policy in place to become a no-cost sponsor at various conferences and are getting many invitations. We need someone who can execute this alliances.
We have also been offered the opportunity to once again do another SPM branded survey on participatory medicine.. We are moving ahead with this and will get a press release out as soon as the results are available.
Learning Exchange
There will be a dry run in a week for the Executive Committee, during our next call and we will officially launch the Learning Exchange in January when we will invite SPM members to participate in the exchange.
Value Proposition
We have a final text for the value proposition and now need to develop a strategy regarding how we will deploy it and for what purpose. We are particularly interested in making sure our value proposition communicates our mission to corporate prospects.
Brochure
We now have a two page brochure which is posted on our website and can be used to attract members. We will be working to enhance that document into a tri-fold brochure
Development Joe Ternullo
We discussed how to proceed with a development plan. Among the things we need to do are to generate some success stories for 2016 and to target an amount of money that we wish to raise over the next year.
Journal Joe and Terry Graedon and Charlie Smith
The journal editors sent a letter to the Board indicating that they need more commitment and support from the Board as well as a better sense of overall direction regarding the function of the Journal in the overall mission and goals of the Society.  Specifically, the Journal needs board members to take on more responsibility for generating and writing articles for the journal and serving as reviewers. The Journal currently lacks the staff to engage in an active system to promote this publication both in traditions channels and in social media. Their needs include a larger budget and more assistance
The Board made clear their conviction that we want to continue to publish the Journal and will work with the editors to develop a strategy to move all of this forward. Jon Wald will take the lead as a liaison between the Society and the Journal and form a sub-committee to map out a strategy for the next 12 months.
Board Meetings
We agreed to increase the board meeting call from 60 – 90 minutes to have enough time for our discussion. Committees should submit their reports before the meeting so people have a chance to review them and we can spend less time going over details.
The next Board meeting is on January 26.
