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How to manage your society events and make your meetings stand out from the rest
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How to manage your society events and make your meetings stand out from the rest
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https://cadmoreoriginalmedia.blob.core.windows.net/195b9e54-2d02-404a-a5a0-06e947051a79/Keeping Meetings Key - Emma Duffy(1).mp4?sv=2019-02-02&sr=c&sig=3nC9SwOZu3uf9HKnsn1uoLapgclsABTawv31lfpFR8c%3D&st=2025-05-09T03%3A33%3A56Z&se=2025-05-09T05%3A38%3A56Z&sp=r
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Segment:0 .
EMMA DUFFY: My name is Emma Duffy. I'm the college's conference and programs officer. I've been at the college about 15 years, which feels like a really long time. But I've worked in the not-for-profit events industry for about 20 years. So hopefully some of my experience, I'll be able to pass on and help you. Just for a start, just because I make all my speakers do this, I have no conflict of interest.
EMMA DUFFY: I'm a member of ABPCO and the co-chair of my son's PTA, but that's about all my conflict of interest at the moment. So I've got some information about the college. So the Royal College of Radiologists is a membership body. We have just over 11,000 members across the world. And we provide professional support, education, and training for radiologists and oncologists. I manage the conference team.
EMMA DUFFY: We deliver face-to-face events, training workshops, webinars, an annual conference, and we are supporting our team in running our e-learning activities and resources. We deliver about 50 face-to-face events every year, two main types, clinical and non-clinical. So non-clinical-- so supervisor skills, training the trainer, training in difficulty, and this sort of clinical side. So best way to do a head and neck X-ray, MSK, musculoskeletal, little bits and pieces as well.
EMMA DUFFY: So that's what the college does. Katie just alluded to the reason that we run events. And you don't need me to tell you the reason that we run events. But in this really crowded marketplace, it's really important to think about how your activities can be the go-to, how you can be the go-to place for your members and nonmembers, in order to attract people into your organization.
EMMA DUFFY: I've seen loads of changes in the event industry in the last few years. But I'd like to share some thoughts with you as to the changes that we've made at the college, and so we achieve consistently good feedback and attendance at our events, which is great. So for me, achieving this falls neatly-- as neatly as events ever can be-- into three main categories, content, delivery methods and channels, and then logistics.
EMMA DUFFY: So my first point is about content. So it's know your audience. This is my audience. A lovely, happy, cheery bunch. This was taken at our [INAUDIBLE] conference two years ago. It's really important that you know who your audience is. You need to focus your marketing and you need to brief your speakers as to what your audience need.
EMMA DUFFY: For us, our audience can be the difference between first-year trainees and consultants on the verge of retirement. So we have to know that the content of our events is meeting the needs of all those people. They might be multidisciplinary, and I've talked a lot about of medical events. So they might be surgeons, radiographers, nurse specialists, podiatrists.
EMMA DUFFY: So you have to think about making your content relevant and accessible, and particularly accessible for those with disabilities. Aims and education on learning outcomes-- this is what you should be looking at when you're putting the content together of your event. It's the biggest bugbear of our delegates is that they attend an event that then doesn't deliver what it's promised.
EMMA DUFFY: So for our delegates, time and budget are the biggest factors for stopping people coming to events. I'm going to talk about e-learning a bit later. And so a lot of them now self-fund their CPD. The NHS sort of insists that people continue to develop CPD, but they don't give them the time or the money out of their hospitals or their clinics to be able to do that. So most of them are now self-funding.
EMMA DUFFY: A lot of our doctors are self-funding, which means that they have to be able to go back to the hospital and tick the box, and they have to know that they've got some really good value for money. We provide our educational aims for all of our events to us in advance. We ask them to submit abstracts, we ask them to submit teaching points and references. And if they don't supply those in advance, or they don't tally what the outcomes are of the event, we ask them to rethink-- obviously quite a lot of you will work with doctors, and you know sometimes they can be an interesting breed.
EMMA DUFFY: But it's taken a while, but most of the speakers that speak regularly for us are used to doing that. Learning-- we call them educational aims. Objectives are much harder to measure, we think. So we call them aims. It's a bit more achievable. And identify USP from inception. So is it a key piece of research? Is it a new mandatory field of regulation or research that your doctors or your members need to know about?
EMMA DUFFY: Is it fulfilling a bit of training? Is it a key piece of research or key speaker? So identify your USP and use it a lot. The next thing about content is speakers. So these are some of my speakers. That's fun with this one. We work with clinical committees who identify the topics for each of our clinical events. And then we work with an appointed meeting organizer who is the person who finds the speakers and puts the program together.
EMMA DUFFY: Obviously, we brief them as to what we want the outcomes of the events to do. But as the expert in their field, they should be the people who know where to get the right speakers. We also use our own experience. So I said I've been at the college 15 years, and my colleague Jo's been with me eight years. And she is an amazing sort of font of knowledge about who that speaker from the cardiac meeting in cardiac was four years ago.
EMMA DUFFY: And so we use our own internal knowledge, which is really important. But we also use other committee members, we use our special interest groups, we use our internal colleagues. So if we need a data or statistics speaker, we go and talk to our audit and surveys team. And our wider membership, you know, our wider membership go out to a lot of other events.
EMMA DUFFY: And so if we're struggling to find a speaker on a particular topic, we'll put a call out in our own newsletter and see if anybody has got any ideas. It was really interesting to hear the conversation earlier about industry relationships. We have just started to involve our industry contacts. The college has suffered quite dramatically in the last few years, and we've lost quite a lot of industry sponsorship for various reasons.
EMMA DUFFY: But we are starting to talk to them, actually, about getting them involved in the educational content. Obviously there are guidelines, they have to be compliant. But we have a policy about who we'll work with and in what ways. So for us, it works really well to get a wider range of speakers. So briefing your speakers well, getting them to give you teaching points and references in advance.
EMMA DUFFY: You have to really clear about what you want from them. And finally, thinking about content evaluation and feedback. So listen to your delegates, use the feedback they give you, obviously within reason. You know, if they'd like a fortnight's conference on a cruise ship in Malta, then it's probably not going to happen.
EMMA DUFFY: But listen to your delegates. Make sure that your feedback is relevant and that you use it to make changes. There's no point in asking people for feedback if you then don't use it. An example of that came up in the earlier session. We, for a number of years, are forever constantly being accused of being London-centric. It's hard as an organization when our headquarters is in London.
EMMA DUFFY: But as a result of this sort of constant accusations of being too London-centric, we now aim to run 50% of our meetings outside of London. So we travel all over the place. So delivery is my next aspect. Every year, my conference photographer sends me my rogue's gallery of delegates who have fallen asleep in my sessions. And I was going to use some of them, and I thought it might be a little inappropriate.
EMMA DUFFY: So you have this one. The colleges traditionally run very standard, didactic, lecture-based conferences, really nothing very exciting. However, the environment has radically changed. And a few years ago, it would be unacceptable for anybody to be sitting here with their laptop out, or their iPad or their phone. But we can use this to our advantage, and it's one of the major changes that the college has introduced in the last couple of years.
EMMA DUFFY: So we encourage an element of interactivity in every single one of our events, so whether that's polling, surveys, online Q&A, mind maps, event apps. And there are loads of free packages and software out there. You don't have to spend a huge amount of money on this kind of stuff. There's loads of free stuff available.
EMMA DUFFY: It just means that actually your delegates are engaging with you. And we found that their feedback, when we introduced doing interactivity, increased their response to what they'd got out of an event. It took us a little while to get our meeting organizers round to the idea. I think a lot of them were quite used to just putting their program together, chairing, sitting down, and not having to engage in an awful lot of ways.
EMMA DUFFY: But they're getting there. Some are better than others, but we're working hard at it. The other thing that's really important for us is networking. Again, I'm going to talk about e-learning later. And one of the issues that we struggled with to start with our e-learning was, potentially, the impact on our face-to-face-- on physical attendance at events. But networking is really important.
EMMA DUFFY: When we ask our delegates what are the most important things about our events, they say, the content, so the CPD, the education, and networking. So for us, it's really important that we provide a decent chunk of time during the day for networking, so good chunks of time at break and lunchtime. It's also really good for your sponsors. Obviously the more time you can get with your delegates, access to your sponsors, they like that.
EMMA DUFFY: And we try and introduce a mix of elements into each event. So there will be some lectures. There'll also be group work, and there'll be some pre-reading, there'll be some post-event resources. And so for us, interactivity and getting people more engaged is really key. So we talked about supporting resources. And again, we talked about this earlier. And this is our e-learning hub.
EMMA DUFFY: We introduced this about two years ago. We're just about to re-tender for a new e-learning hub. But this was in response to our members saying they had little time out of the organization. And also, for us, an increase in overseas members. So obviously our overseas members have less access to us face to face. So our e-learning hub is broken down by resource and also by clinical specialty.
EMMA DUFFY: So if you are a radiologist, you can go onto our e-learning hub and you can look at all the resources around cardiac imaging, MSK. Also, one of the most recent innovative sort of e-learning project that we've just introduced is our COPP project, so Clinical Outlining Planning-- I knew I'd get that wrong-- Planning Platform. And so when an oncologist is coming to outline a tumor for radiotherapy treatment, previously-- please don't be scared by this-- they used to print the scan out and draw around it with different-color pens.
EMMA DUFFY: And now we have an amazing piece of software which allows people to sort of practice on tumor sites. So we now introduce this-- we introduced this in the workshop section of our annual conference last year, and we had 60 oncologists sitting in that session, which was the most we'd ever had at our annual conference in a number of years. And we do some training around-- they do some pre-work.
EMMA DUFFY: So they will outline some tumors before the conference. They'll then come and have some time with some specialists. They'll hear some lectures about how to do it. Then they'll re-outline the tumors, and then they'll get personalized feedback on their differences. They'll talk about gold standards. We'll talk about what could have gone better, what we could have done.
EMMA DUFFY: So that was really interesting for us, and that was a big piece of work. And we're just in the process of rolling that out to all of our clinical oncology days, and to start thinking about it in terms of our exam. So again, at the moment, if you're doing your clinical oncology exams, you're drawing around the tumor site as opposed to doing it on this site.
EMMA DUFFY: We have been doing webinars for about 18 months. We do them monthly, and we also alternate the time of day that they happen. So we tend to run them either at lunchtime or at the end of the day. We record all of them. They are a hugely positive overseas member benefit. So if you can't listen or watch a webinar live, within-- depending on how busy our learning technologist is, within a couple of days, it's up on our website and it's up on our e-learning hub.
EMMA DUFFY: There are loads of software options. We use GoToTraining, but they're excellent in real-time, but they're a really positive resource to have afterwards. We also do podcasts. So we, again, link our podcasts through our journal articles. We work quite closely with our journals team around special editions. And we also, last year for the first time, recorded some "in conversation" podcasts with our journal editor and our key speakers, from the annual conference.
EMMA DUFFY: We are about to launch our first livestreaming project. It's mildly terrifying me at the moment. That's the thing at the top of my to-do list. But we are going to livestream some of the sessions from our annual conference in October. We're going to start it with some overseas hubs, and we're going to ask people to congregate in hospitals, as opposed to doing it to individuals, just so that we can get a bit of a better idea of some feedback and how the sessions go.
EMMA DUFFY: So we're introducing quite a lot of new stuff. Our CPD video library is one of our most popular online resources. So we record about five or six of lectures from each of our events, but we publish about four from each event. So this, again, allows us to manage the impact on the physical attendance. But also, I may see my video of this lecture and go, no way, you're not publishing that anywhere.
EMMA DUFFY: So we do have speakers who say, I'd rather you didn't publish that, thank you. But we promote additions to the library in each of our monthly e-bulletins. So we'll say, this month, we've just launched x, y, and z. We've also just-- we're working with the external company that provides our CPD library to work on some pop-ups. So we're going to be that irritating kind of "if you liked this, you might like this." And we're going to use that to promote our face-to-face events.
EMMA DUFFY: So our CPD video library is another sort of additional resource. This is one of my favorite new resources. So this is what I class an off-the-cuff resource. So Dr. Lisa Shannon, who's a radiologist in-- I'm going to say-- Bradford, comes to a lot of our events. And her note-taking technique is sketch noting. So she draws her notes.
EMMA DUFFY: And at the 2017 annual conference, she started tweeting us her lecture notes. And I just was a bit smitten. I just think they're beautiful, and they're educational at the same time. And so we got in contact with her, and she came and documented, in this way, a lot of the sessions and all our plenary sessions from the 2018 annual conference.
EMMA DUFFY: So we retweet hers, we put it up on our e-learning hub, and we put it up on our website. So there are lots of different ways that you can of enhance your events. The final element I want to talk about is logistics. So it feels really patronizing because you probably know all this. But in my experience, the biggest grumbles that we get from our delegates are bad logistics-- so the map wasn't right, you didn't tell me what time I had to be here, that kind of stuff.
EMMA DUFFY: And they tend to grumble more about that than they do about the content. So use either an in-house team-- this is my in-house team, and this is my guru colleague, Jo, she's my customer service whizz-- or an external team. So there are a huge number of fantastic external events companies out there that know everything there is to know about the world of events.
EMMA DUFFY: We utilize project management software, but we also have internal processes. We use a lot of spreadsheets, we use a lot of flow diagrams to make sure that all of our business processes are documented so that if any one of us running an event got hit by a bus, somebody else in the team could pick it up and know exactly where we were at in the process. I'm really big on face-to-face meetings, so I have lots of face-to-face meetings with my team, even if it's just to go, right, what's everyone's pressure point for the next three days?
EMMA DUFFY: They probably get sick of me. But I also meet regularly with suppliers, even if I don't have anything to talk to them about or to tell them. I think it's just really nice to keep relationships strong like that. We have service-level agreements with all of our suppliers, and I have KPIs with all of my team around every single thing that we do.
EMMA DUFFY: It just lets everybody know what is expected of them, and it's a really good starting point in a conversation if something hasn't gone quite so well. My other big thing is customer service. So as I said, this is my colleague, Jo. She's been with me eight years, and she is an absolute customer service whizz. So for me, customer service is about exceeding expectations and doing something extra that somebody isn't expecting.
EMMA DUFFY: We had one of our annual admissions ceremonies, our graduation ceremonies, a couple of weeks ago. And as we were taking all of our graduates and their guests up to the big hall, a grandmother was there to see her-- lady was there to see her daughter graduate. And due to health and safety reasons, we couldn't allow buggies in the hall. And at that point, her grandson chose that exact moment to fall asleep.
EMMA DUFFY: And so she'd been there-- and so for most of our radiologists and oncologists, this is probably the highlight or the end point of eight to 10 years worth of training, so it's a really, really big deal, their graduation ceremonies. And my colleague, Jo, spotted this lady kind of walking the perimeter outside the corridor walking the perimeter of the venue, and popped out, and just said, oh, are you here to see someone graduate?
EMMA DUFFY: And she very tearfully said, yes, my daughter, but I think I'm going to miss it. And Jo was like, no, you're not, you go, I'll stay here. And it was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing. The woman was just delighted. And it just meant that-- it was no real big deal for Jo to do that, but it just made a real impact. And the other thing I wanted to sort of mention was about knowledge-sharing and networking.
EMMA DUFFY: I'm a member of the Intercollegiate Event Managers Group, which I know a number of the other medical royal colleges that are here have representatives on. It's really good to use networks. So recently we've been thinking about re-tendering some bits and pieces. And I just emailed the group and said, this is what we're thinking of doing. Has anyone done it?
EMMA DUFFY: Who would they recommend? And it sort of saves the legwork a little bit. So use your networks. They're really, really, really important. The last few slides-- getting the basics right. Again, it feels a bit patronizing to tell you this, but choose the right venue. Is it big enough?
EMMA DUFFY: Does it have some lovely natural daylight? We don't ever want natural daylight, because our doctors are looking at images, and X-rays, and scans, and so we want it as dark as possible. But what they do want is they want some outside space, and they want lots of daylight in their catering area. So we know that that's the kind of venues that we look for. What is it around the venue's sort of environmental credentials?
EMMA DUFFY: What do they do with their leftovers? What's their recycling policy? It's something I know Jonathan is going to talk about, but it's something that we're starting to look at to actually make sure that we're being sort of sustainable. Catering is so important. If my delegates moan about catering and nothing else, then I'm happy.
EMMA DUFFY: If they just have that little moan, then it's absolutely fine. For our doctors it's a really big thing for some reason. But there have been huge changes recently. So we try to cater locally, seasonally, and healthily. So unfortunately, we no longer provide cakes at afternoon break time. But we do have lots of fruit, we have smoothies, we have flavored waters.
EMMA DUFFY: And we also try to make sure that each venue allocates a dietary champion, so that obviously it's really important to make sure that your dietary needs of your delegates are catered for. But also, sometimes, our delegates like to have somebody that can actually talk about, what they're eating. Technology and A/V-- again, just making sure that you know what your speakers need is all in place.
EMMA DUFFY: And then delegate communications and processes-- sometimes they need a bit of handholding. And I think, sometimes, we get a bit frustrated that they should know stuff, but actually they sometimes don't. So common sense is sometimes a bit lacking. And these people are incredibly busy. I think we sometimes forget that, actually, coming to our event is not their core purpose for today. It's actually the fact that they've left a clinic, or they've got a paper to write.
EMMA DUFFY: So we like to be patient and thoughtful with them, and we like to be fair and consistent so that all of our delegates are treated the same. Suppliers-- find good ones, and keep them is my only bit of advice about suppliers. And change them if you've got any concerns. I'm a bit of a gut-feel girl. And if it doesn't feel right, it's probably never going to feel right.
EMMA DUFFY: So don't be scared of changing suppliers if need be. And resources-- bags, pens, packs-- think about whether you need them, think about whether your delegates really want them, think about the sustainability of them. Our annual conference, about four years ago, we stopped supplying a traditional sort of medical conference bag, because our delegates just told us that they just put them in a drawer.
EMMA DUFFY: And some of them had three or four years' worth, and then they'd either just drop them in the bin or give them to their colleagues. So we don't do them anymore. We have a really good event app which has all that information on it. And we have stands around where people can pick up their lanyards and their pens.
EMMA DUFFY: I added a summary slide, which I forgot, then, to send to Georgia. So in summary, ensure that your learning aim and content is strong and relevant to your audience. Research and develop new delivery methods. Provide pre and post-event supporting resources where possible. Ensure that logistical plans and processes are robust. And surround yourself with experts.
EMMA DUFFY: Thank you. It's been really lovely to talk to you. Really blatant plug for a couple of organizations that we are involved with-- so ABPCO is the Association of British Professional Conference Organizers. Leonard Cheshire and Charityworks are two schemes that the college works with around recent graduates into the charity sector.
EMMA DUFFY: So Charityworks is a year-long intern scheme. And it's a talent process to basically try and get the best young graduates into the charity sector. And Leonard Cheshire, the Change 100 scheme is a three-month internship for recent graduates with disabilities. And it aims to give them the confidence to disclose disabilities to employers, but also supports employers to make employers understand and realize that, actually, reasonable adjustments for most disabilities are really, really simple, and can be hugely beneficial to a company.
EMMA DUFFY: So yeah, please feel free to ask me any questions. There's my details. Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
Segment:0 .
EMMA DUFFY: My name is Emma Duffy. I'm the college's conference and programs officer. I've been at the college about 15 years, which feels like a really long time. But I've worked in the not-for-profit events industry for about 20 years. So hopefully some of my experience, I'll be able to pass on and help you. Just for a start, just because I make all my speakers do this, I have no conflict of interest.
EMMA DUFFY: I'm a member of ABPCO and the co-chair of my son's PTA, but that's about all my conflict of interest at the moment. So I've got some information about the college. So the Royal College of Radiologists is a membership body. We have just over 11,000 members across the world. And we provide professional support, education, and training for radiologists and oncologists. I manage the conference team.
EMMA DUFFY: We deliver face-to-face events, training workshops, webinars, an annual conference, and we are supporting our team in running our e-learning activities and resources. We deliver about 50 face-to-face events every year, two main types, clinical and non-clinical. So non-clinical-- so supervisor skills, training the trainer, training in difficulty, and this sort of clinical side. So best way to do a head and neck X-ray, MSK, musculoskeletal, little bits and pieces as well.
EMMA DUFFY: So that's what the college does. Katie just alluded to the reason that we run events. And you don't need me to tell you the reason that we run events. But in this really crowded marketplace, it's really important to think about how your activities can be the go-to, how you can be the go-to place for your members and nonmembers, in order to attract people into your organization.
EMMA DUFFY: I've seen loads of changes in the event industry in the last few years. But I'd like to share some thoughts with you as to the changes that we've made at the college, and so we achieve consistently good feedback and attendance at our events, which is great. So for me, achieving this falls neatly-- as neatly as events ever can be-- into three main categories, content, delivery methods and channels, and then logistics.
EMMA DUFFY: So my first point is about content. So it's know your audience. This is my audience. A lovely, happy, cheery bunch. This was taken at our [INAUDIBLE] conference two years ago. It's really important that you know who your audience is. You need to focus your marketing and you need to brief your speakers as to what your audience need.
EMMA DUFFY: For us, our audience can be the difference between first-year trainees and consultants on the verge of retirement. So we have to know that the content of our events is meeting the needs of all those people. They might be multidisciplinary, and I've talked a lot about of medical events. So they might be surgeons, radiographers, nurse specialists, podiatrists.
EMMA DUFFY: So you have to think about making your content relevant and accessible, and particularly accessible for those with disabilities. Aims and education on learning outcomes-- this is what you should be looking at when you're putting the content together of your event. It's the biggest bugbear of our delegates is that they attend an event that then doesn't deliver what it's promised.
EMMA DUFFY: So for our delegates, time and budget are the biggest factors for stopping people coming to events. I'm going to talk about e-learning a bit later. And so a lot of them now self-fund their CPD. The NHS sort of insists that people continue to develop CPD, but they don't give them the time or the money out of their hospitals or their clinics to be able to do that. So most of them are now self-funding.
EMMA DUFFY: A lot of our doctors are self-funding, which means that they have to be able to go back to the hospital and tick the box, and they have to know that they've got some really good value for money. We provide our educational aims for all of our events to us in advance. We ask them to submit abstracts, we ask them to submit teaching points and references. And if they don't supply those in advance, or they don't tally what the outcomes are of the event, we ask them to rethink-- obviously quite a lot of you will work with doctors, and you know sometimes they can be an interesting breed.
EMMA DUFFY: But it's taken a while, but most of the speakers that speak regularly for us are used to doing that. Learning-- we call them educational aims. Objectives are much harder to measure, we think. So we call them aims. It's a bit more achievable. And identify USP from inception. So is it a key piece of research? Is it a new mandatory field of regulation or research that your doctors or your members need to know about?
EMMA DUFFY: Is it fulfilling a bit of training? Is it a key piece of research or key speaker? So identify your USP and use it a lot. The next thing about content is speakers. So these are some of my speakers. That's fun with this one. We work with clinical committees who identify the topics for each of our clinical events. And then we work with an appointed meeting organizer who is the person who finds the speakers and puts the program together.
EMMA DUFFY: Obviously, we brief them as to what we want the outcomes of the events to do. But as the expert in their field, they should be the people who know where to get the right speakers. We also use our own experience. So I said I've been at the college 15 years, and my colleague Jo's been with me eight years. And she is an amazing sort of font of knowledge about who that speaker from the cardiac meeting in cardiac was four years ago.
EMMA DUFFY: And so we use our own internal knowledge, which is really important. But we also use other committee members, we use our special interest groups, we use our internal colleagues. So if we need a data or statistics speaker, we go and talk to our audit and surveys team. And our wider membership, you know, our wider membership go out to a lot of other events.
EMMA DUFFY: And so if we're struggling to find a speaker on a particular topic, we'll put a call out in our own newsletter and see if anybody has got any ideas. It was really interesting to hear the conversation earlier about industry relationships. We have just started to involve our industry contacts. The college has suffered quite dramatically in the last few years, and we've lost quite a lot of industry sponsorship for various reasons.
EMMA DUFFY: But we are starting to talk to them, actually, about getting them involved in the educational content. Obviously there are guidelines, they have to be compliant. But we have a policy about who we'll work with and in what ways. So for us, it works really well to get a wider range of speakers. So briefing your speakers well, getting them to give you teaching points and references in advance.
EMMA DUFFY: You have to really clear about what you want from them. And finally, thinking about content evaluation and feedback. So listen to your delegates, use the feedback they give you, obviously within reason. You know, if they'd like a fortnight's conference on a cruise ship in Malta, then it's probably not going to happen.
EMMA DUFFY: But listen to your delegates. Make sure that your feedback is relevant and that you use it to make changes. There's no point in asking people for feedback if you then don't use it. An example of that came up in the earlier session. We, for a number of years, are forever constantly being accused of being London-centric. It's hard as an organization when our headquarters is in London.
EMMA DUFFY: But as a result of this sort of constant accusations of being too London-centric, we now aim to run 50% of our meetings outside of London. So we travel all over the place. So delivery is my next aspect. Every year, my conference photographer sends me my rogue's gallery of delegates who have fallen asleep in my sessions. And I was going to use some of them, and I thought it might be a little inappropriate.
EMMA DUFFY: So you have this one. The colleges traditionally run very standard, didactic, lecture-based conferences, really nothing very exciting. However, the environment has radically changed. And a few years ago, it would be unacceptable for anybody to be sitting here with their laptop out, or their iPad or their phone. But we can use this to our advantage, and it's one of the major changes that the college has introduced in the last couple of years.
EMMA DUFFY: So we encourage an element of interactivity in every single one of our events, so whether that's polling, surveys, online Q&A, mind maps, event apps. And there are loads of free packages and software out there. You don't have to spend a huge amount of money on this kind of stuff. There's loads of free stuff available.
EMMA DUFFY: It just means that actually your delegates are engaging with you. And we found that their feedback, when we introduced doing interactivity, increased their response to what they'd got out of an event. It took us a little while to get our meeting organizers round to the idea. I think a lot of them were quite used to just putting their program together, chairing, sitting down, and not having to engage in an awful lot of ways.
EMMA DUFFY: But they're getting there. Some are better than others, but we're working hard at it. The other thing that's really important for us is networking. Again, I'm going to talk about e-learning later. And one of the issues that we struggled with to start with our e-learning was, potentially, the impact on our face-to-face-- on physical attendance at events. But networking is really important.
EMMA DUFFY: When we ask our delegates what are the most important things about our events, they say, the content, so the CPD, the education, and networking. So for us, it's really important that we provide a decent chunk of time during the day for networking, so good chunks of time at break and lunchtime. It's also really good for your sponsors. Obviously the more time you can get with your delegates, access to your sponsors, they like that.
EMMA DUFFY: And we try and introduce a mix of elements into each event. So there will be some lectures. There'll also be group work, and there'll be some pre-reading, there'll be some post-event resources. And so for us, interactivity and getting people more engaged is really key. So we talked about supporting resources. And again, we talked about this earlier. And this is our e-learning hub.
EMMA DUFFY: We introduced this about two years ago. We're just about to re-tender for a new e-learning hub. But this was in response to our members saying they had little time out of the organization. And also, for us, an increase in overseas members. So obviously our overseas members have less access to us face to face. So our e-learning hub is broken down by resource and also by clinical specialty.
EMMA DUFFY: So if you are a radiologist, you can go onto our e-learning hub and you can look at all the resources around cardiac imaging, MSK. Also, one of the most recent innovative sort of e-learning project that we've just introduced is our COPP project, so Clinical Outlining Planning-- I knew I'd get that wrong-- Planning Platform. And so when an oncologist is coming to outline a tumor for radiotherapy treatment, previously-- please don't be scared by this-- they used to print the scan out and draw around it with different-color pens.
EMMA DUFFY: And now we have an amazing piece of software which allows people to sort of practice on tumor sites. So we now introduce this-- we introduced this in the workshop section of our annual conference last year, and we had 60 oncologists sitting in that session, which was the most we'd ever had at our annual conference in a number of years. And we do some training around-- they do some pre-work.
EMMA DUFFY: So they will outline some tumors before the conference. They'll then come and have some time with some specialists. They'll hear some lectures about how to do it. Then they'll re-outline the tumors, and then they'll get personalized feedback on their differences. They'll talk about gold standards. We'll talk about what could have gone better, what we could have done.
EMMA DUFFY: So that was really interesting for us, and that was a big piece of work. And we're just in the process of rolling that out to all of our clinical oncology days, and to start thinking about it in terms of our exam. So again, at the moment, if you're doing your clinical oncology exams, you're drawing around the tumor site as opposed to doing it on this site.
EMMA DUFFY: We have been doing webinars for about 18 months. We do them monthly, and we also alternate the time of day that they happen. So we tend to run them either at lunchtime or at the end of the day. We record all of them. They are a hugely positive overseas member benefit. So if you can't listen or watch a webinar live, within-- depending on how busy our learning technologist is, within a couple of days, it's up on our website and it's up on our e-learning hub.
EMMA DUFFY: There are loads of software options. We use GoToTraining, but they're excellent in real-time, but they're a really positive resource to have afterwards. We also do podcasts. So we, again, link our podcasts through our journal articles. We work quite closely with our journals team around special editions. And we also, last year for the first time, recorded some "in conversation" podcasts with our journal editor and our key speakers, from the annual conference.
EMMA DUFFY: We are about to launch our first livestreaming project. It's mildly terrifying me at the moment. That's the thing at the top of my to-do list. But we are going to livestream some of the sessions from our annual conference in October. We're going to start it with some overseas hubs, and we're going to ask people to congregate in hospitals, as opposed to doing it to individuals, just so that we can get a bit of a better idea of some feedback and how the sessions go.
EMMA DUFFY: So we're introducing quite a lot of new stuff. Our CPD video library is one of our most popular online resources. So we record about five or six of lectures from each of our events, but we publish about four from each event. So this, again, allows us to manage the impact on the physical attendance. But also, I may see my video of this lecture and go, no way, you're not publishing that anywhere.
EMMA DUFFY: So we do have speakers who say, I'd rather you didn't publish that, thank you. But we promote additions to the library in each of our monthly e-bulletins. So we'll say, this month, we've just launched x, y, and z. We've also just-- we're working with the external company that provides our CPD library to work on some pop-ups. So we're going to be that irritating kind of "if you liked this, you might like this." And we're going to use that to promote our face-to-face events.
EMMA DUFFY: So our CPD video library is another sort of additional resource. This is one of my favorite new resources. So this is what I class an off-the-cuff resource. So Dr. Lisa Shannon, who's a radiologist in-- I'm going to say-- Bradford, comes to a lot of our events. And her note-taking technique is sketch noting. So she draws her notes.
EMMA DUFFY: And at the 2017 annual conference, she started tweeting us her lecture notes. And I just was a bit smitten. I just think they're beautiful, and they're educational at the same time. And so we got in contact with her, and she came and documented, in this way, a lot of the sessions and all our plenary sessions from the 2018 annual conference.
EMMA DUFFY: So we retweet hers, we put it up on our e-learning hub, and we put it up on our website. So there are lots of different ways that you can of enhance your events. The final element I want to talk about is logistics. So it feels really patronizing because you probably know all this. But in my experience, the biggest grumbles that we get from our delegates are bad logistics-- so the map wasn't right, you didn't tell me what time I had to be here, that kind of stuff.
EMMA DUFFY: And they tend to grumble more about that than they do about the content. So use either an in-house team-- this is my in-house team, and this is my guru colleague, Jo, she's my customer service whizz-- or an external team. So there are a huge number of fantastic external events companies out there that know everything there is to know about the world of events.
EMMA DUFFY: We utilize project management software, but we also have internal processes. We use a lot of spreadsheets, we use a lot of flow diagrams to make sure that all of our business processes are documented so that if any one of us running an event got hit by a bus, somebody else in the team could pick it up and know exactly where we were at in the process. I'm really big on face-to-face meetings, so I have lots of face-to-face meetings with my team, even if it's just to go, right, what's everyone's pressure point for the next three days?
EMMA DUFFY: They probably get sick of me. But I also meet regularly with suppliers, even if I don't have anything to talk to them about or to tell them. I think it's just really nice to keep relationships strong like that. We have service-level agreements with all of our suppliers, and I have KPIs with all of my team around every single thing that we do.
EMMA DUFFY: It just lets everybody know what is expected of them, and it's a really good starting point in a conversation if something hasn't gone quite so well. My other big thing is customer service. So as I said, this is my colleague, Jo. She's been with me eight years, and she is an absolute customer service whizz. So for me, customer service is about exceeding expectations and doing something extra that somebody isn't expecting.
EMMA DUFFY: We had one of our annual admissions ceremonies, our graduation ceremonies, a couple of weeks ago. And as we were taking all of our graduates and their guests up to the big hall, a grandmother was there to see her-- lady was there to see her daughter graduate. And due to health and safety reasons, we couldn't allow buggies in the hall. And at that point, her grandson chose that exact moment to fall asleep.
EMMA DUFFY: And so she'd been there-- and so for most of our radiologists and oncologists, this is probably the highlight or the end point of eight to 10 years worth of training, so it's a really, really big deal, their graduation ceremonies. And my colleague, Jo, spotted this lady kind of walking the perimeter outside the corridor walking the perimeter of the venue, and popped out, and just said, oh, are you here to see someone graduate?
EMMA DUFFY: And she very tearfully said, yes, my daughter, but I think I'm going to miss it. And Jo was like, no, you're not, you go, I'll stay here. And it was tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny little thing. The woman was just delighted. And it just meant that-- it was no real big deal for Jo to do that, but it just made a real impact. And the other thing I wanted to sort of mention was about knowledge-sharing and networking.
EMMA DUFFY: I'm a member of the Intercollegiate Event Managers Group, which I know a number of the other medical royal colleges that are here have representatives on. It's really good to use networks. So recently we've been thinking about re-tendering some bits and pieces. And I just emailed the group and said, this is what we're thinking of doing. Has anyone done it?
EMMA DUFFY: Who would they recommend? And it sort of saves the legwork a little bit. So use your networks. They're really, really, really important. The last few slides-- getting the basics right. Again, it feels a bit patronizing to tell you this, but choose the right venue. Is it big enough?
EMMA DUFFY: Does it have some lovely natural daylight? We don't ever want natural daylight, because our doctors are looking at images, and X-rays, and scans, and so we want it as dark as possible. But what they do want is they want some outside space, and they want lots of daylight in their catering area. So we know that that's the kind of venues that we look for. What is it around the venue's sort of environmental credentials?
EMMA DUFFY: What do they do with their leftovers? What's their recycling policy? It's something I know Jonathan is going to talk about, but it's something that we're starting to look at to actually make sure that we're being sort of sustainable. Catering is so important. If my delegates moan about catering and nothing else, then I'm happy.
EMMA DUFFY: If they just have that little moan, then it's absolutely fine. For our doctors it's a really big thing for some reason. But there have been huge changes recently. So we try to cater locally, seasonally, and healthily. So unfortunately, we no longer provide cakes at afternoon break time. But we do have lots of fruit, we have smoothies, we have flavored waters.
EMMA DUFFY: And we also try to make sure that each venue allocates a dietary champion, so that obviously it's really important to make sure that your dietary needs of your delegates are catered for. But also, sometimes, our delegates like to have somebody that can actually talk about, what they're eating. Technology and A/V-- again, just making sure that you know what your speakers need is all in place.
EMMA DUFFY: And then delegate communications and processes-- sometimes they need a bit of handholding. And I think, sometimes, we get a bit frustrated that they should know stuff, but actually they sometimes don't. So common sense is sometimes a bit lacking. And these people are incredibly busy. I think we sometimes forget that, actually, coming to our event is not their core purpose for today. It's actually the fact that they've left a clinic, or they've got a paper to write.
EMMA DUFFY: So we like to be patient and thoughtful with them, and we like to be fair and consistent so that all of our delegates are treated the same. Suppliers-- find good ones, and keep them is my only bit of advice about suppliers. And change them if you've got any concerns. I'm a bit of a gut-feel girl. And if it doesn't feel right, it's probably never going to feel right.
EMMA DUFFY: So don't be scared of changing suppliers if need be. And resources-- bags, pens, packs-- think about whether you need them, think about whether your delegates really want them, think about the sustainability of them. Our annual conference, about four years ago, we stopped supplying a traditional sort of medical conference bag, because our delegates just told us that they just put them in a drawer.
EMMA DUFFY: And some of them had three or four years' worth, and then they'd either just drop them in the bin or give them to their colleagues. So we don't do them anymore. We have a really good event app which has all that information on it. And we have stands around where people can pick up their lanyards and their pens.
EMMA DUFFY: I added a summary slide, which I forgot, then, to send to Georgia. So in summary, ensure that your learning aim and content is strong and relevant to your audience. Research and develop new delivery methods. Provide pre and post-event supporting resources where possible. Ensure that logistical plans and processes are robust. And surround yourself with experts.
EMMA DUFFY: Thank you. It's been really lovely to talk to you. Really blatant plug for a couple of organizations that we are involved with-- so ABPCO is the Association of British Professional Conference Organizers. Leonard Cheshire and Charityworks are two schemes that the college works with around recent graduates into the charity sector.
EMMA DUFFY: So Charityworks is a year-long intern scheme. And it's a talent process to basically try and get the best young graduates into the charity sector. And Leonard Cheshire, the Change 100 scheme is a three-month internship for recent graduates with disabilities. And it aims to give them the confidence to disclose disabilities to employers, but also supports employers to make employers understand and realize that, actually, reasonable adjustments for most disabilities are really, really simple, and can be hugely beneficial to a company.
EMMA DUFFY: So yeah, please feel free to ask me any questions. There's my details. Thank you.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
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