Participants: Peter Elias, John Grohol, Janice McCallum, Danny Sands, Joe Ternullo, Sue Woods

Minutes from September 11, 2018 meeting (Janice) approved

Announcements  

Danny –Partnerships/sponsors. PatientsLikeMe (PLM) will be a sponsor for the conference. They got an infusion of capital from a Chinese genomics company last year & are realizing that they need to help consumers take care of themselves. Cliff Pollan is new head of strategy for PLM.

Conference

Updates on preparations for the October 17 conference and booth at Connected Health.

Next Learning Exchange

Victor Montori from Mayo is a possible speaker for November.

Leadership  Google sheets list

We need to recruit candidates for Treasurer & President-elect. John Grohol has been interviewing people for treasurer. He has interviewed a couple of people so far, but neither has fit the bill.

John will continue to help with website, but he wants to hand-off treasurer piece. He points out that our membership system needs attention. If would be helpful to have a new board member with experience managing membership systems.

We also need to recruit new members-at-large for the board. Members who comment/participate frequently on Connect should make good candidates. Peter recommends that we contact members who post to Connect, but aren’t currently actively volunteering in other areas. Peter will generate a list of most active participants as a start.

Other aspects of electing new board members that we discussed: how do we recruit for more diversity? What composition do we want on the board?

Retreat

Danny: There are trade-offs in delaying the retreat until a couple of months after the conference; namely, it is difficult to gather people together. Sue suggests early 2019. Danny thinks January is good time, since we’ll know who new leadership is by then.

Sarah pointed out that the list of board candidates includes some of people haven’t taken an active role in the society. [Some are not even members of S4PM.] She questions whether non-active members will devote time to board meetings and activities, which is especially important for officers. She recommends we recruit people who have demonstrated some success in involvement with S4PM.

Other: – A Focus on Member Interests (Sue)                                                   

Sue points out that we’ve attracted a lot of new members in the past six months or so who have great & varied backgrounds and she wants to make sure that we engage new (and existing) members to our mutual benefit. An obvious place to start is to communicate with new members.

Joe mentioned that prior to his term as president, he reached out to a new members frequently. But, it takes a lot of work and he had to stop because it became essentially a full-time job. We all agree that there is a lot of untapped potential w/in membership, but we don’t have a plan to harness that untapped potential. With all volunteers, it’s very difficult to consistently engage new members.

Danny would like input on how best to harness help from our membership & find the right fit for our priorities.

Next Executive meeting is November 13, 2018 at 4 pm.

Respectfully submitted,
Janice McCallum
SPM Board Secretary