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

Minutes from August 14 meeting (Janice) approved

Learning Exchange (Sarah)

September Learning Exchange was held earlier on the day of this Executive Committee meeting. Webinar was excellent, but attendance was low. Timing of the promotions in late August likely played a role. Also, there were some negative comments about the registration process, which required a company name. Patients who don’t work for a company may find this off-putting. Also, when clicking the Webex link to attend webinar, it required registering again.

Conference logistics – status updates (Joe)

Most of this meeting was devoted to issues related to the upcoming conference on October 17. The executive committee discussed how we could help overcome some of the obstacles related to registering for the conference and especially registering speakers and uploading their profiles. Beth Barnett is helping on both counts.

We are at 32 registrations as of Monday (~15% of goal). We really need to ramp up promotional activities, including personal marketing by board members to their network.

Sue’s President’s letter went out yesterday. We hope that will help.

Danny: sponsorships are up to $13,500. Have handful of other possible sponsors. Expect up to $25,000.

Inspire: John Novack pitched his company to sponsor in some form. They want to sponsor registrations—at $10K, they’ll get 10 registrations. Joe will discuss with John Grohol after the meeting to work out best solution to have the sponsorship cover patient registrations.

Doc Tom Award (Sue)

Three judges have committed. (Dave got commitments from Sharon Terry & Jan Oldenburg as judges, along with Dave.)

 

Marketing (Danny)

Sue: Judy stopped the marketing meeting because people weren’t attending. It has been subsumed into the Monday Conference conference call.

Next big thing: Jan Oldenburg is coordinating cross-promotion with other orgs.

Travel Scholarships (Danny)

Sue asked about travel scholarships. Danny responded that we’ve been receiving applications & processing them. Application links to a Google form, then committee gets in touch with them within a week. Up to $500 is rewarded.

John Grohol asked about travel reimbursement for speakers who need assistance. Danny suggested we reach out to the 2 speakers who requested travel awards to describe what we will cover.

Other: Idea – Exploring member interests (Sue)                                               

Sue just wanted to raise the subject of identifying member interests at this time. Her idea includes extracting data from usage on Connect to see what topics elicit the most interest & responses. Group agreed that we should consider other sources of data, too, since as Danny points out, the most active members on Connect may not be representative.

Leadership (Danny)

Danny asked everyone to add names to Google sheets list & comment on existing suggestions.

Joe raised issue of funding a paid executive director, but we agreed to table that topic for now.

Retreat

Peter asked whether we were planning a retreat, similar to what we did last year after the conference. It was suggested that we consider holding a retreat in the Spring when the new group of leaders are onboard. Right after the conference wasn’t the best time last year.

Next Executive meeting is October 9, 2018 at 4 pm.

Respectfully submitted,
Janice McCallum
SPM Board Secretary