When you attend conferences focused broadly on the CME enterprise (or better yet, if you simply wait for CMEpalooza in the spring and fall), you can’t help but stumble upon education focused on big picture topics. If you’ve been in this industry for any amount of time, you know what I mean.

Outcomes assessment. Educational design. Grant development. Accreditation. Technology. That sort of stuff.

That said, there are many nooks and crannies within the day-to-day work and success of the CME professional that are never discussed during these conferences but are nonetheless crucial to the success (or not) of our work. In these next few weeks, I’m going to touch on a few of these areas and share some real-life scenarios for you to chew on. And yes, these all happened to me during my career.

Today’s Topic: Faculty Recruitment

For many accredited initiatives, one of the first steps in the implementation process involves getting faculty on board. Sometimes, this can be easy, especially if you have a personal relationship with the person(s) you want to invite. It’s much harder to say no to someone you have worked with before (assuming you like and trust them) than a random stranger dangling an opportunity. Being the “random stranger” comes with the territory sometimes, though.

I have probably used the same faculty invitation template for the last 15 years. It’s pretty straightforward – here is the project, here are the deliverables, here are the expectations as faculty, here is the honoraria we’re offering. Typically, I’ll give faculty a week to respond “Yay” or “Nay.” There are often hiccups – the OOO message that forces you to decide, “How long do I wait now for a response?”, the ghosting despite multiple entreaties, or the “this is not enough money” negotiation. You are getting pressure internally while this is going on (“We promised in the grant proposal that this activity would launch in 3 months, and you can’t get faculty on board so we can start?!?!?!”), but there isn’t often a whole lot under your control. That’s the worst part of it.

Let’s look at a few specific scenarios and talk through some possible ways to handle them. Again, these all happened. To me.

SCENARIO 1: You craft your usual faculty invitation language for participation in a satellite symposium, but instead of offering the $3,000 to each presenting faculty member, you mistakenly offer the $5,000 that was earmarked only for the faculty chair. You realize your error within 5 minutes of sending the invitation.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Can you send a follow-up email that says, “Oops, we didn’t mean to offer you this amount of honoraria. Here is the real offer”? Probably not. You likely just have to bite the bullet and pay what you offered in the email (I’m assuming it’s not something really egregious like offering $30,000 instead of $3,000, which would be an obvious error that you would need to clarify, but also that most faculty would notice and question). The best scenario — sort of — would be for all of the faculty who were offered the wrong amount to say, “No,” so that you could correct the amount in the next round of offers. What is more likely is that some of these faculty will say yes and some will say no. So then do you need to offer the erroneously high amount to the next round of faculty? Probably not, but it’s something to consider in case the faculty talk amongst themselves about the honoraria they are being paid. It would look really bad for Dr. X to receive one amount while Dr. Y receives a different amount for the same work.

WHAT I DID: Fortunately, it’s been a while since I made this error though I did offer less than I should have last year (though we’re talking a $500 difference) that was accepted by faculty. In the scenario described above, I am fairly certain we made the internal decision to offer all faculty the erroneous amount in my initial email. That didn’t make me a hero to the budget folks as it likely cost our organization an extra $5,000 or more, but it was the right thing to do.

SCENARIO 2: You need two faculty for an online activity. Each week, you send out two invitations, giving each person a week to accept (or not). After 4 weeks, you have gotten nothing but declines or ignores, and you are getting internal pressure to get things moving. So, the next week, you send out 4 invitations, hoping for at least 1 acceptance. Instead, you get 3 people to accept. Oops.

WHAT YOU CAN DO: Certainly, it would be possible to bring all three faculty on board, though this again has budgetary implications. You could ignore one of the faculty commitments and pretend you didn’t receive it. You could come clean by explaining the scenario and “dis-invite” one of the faculty.

WHAT I DID: I wrote a very nicely worded email to the third faculty member who accepted our invitation, explaining that we heard from a previously out-of-office invited faculty member after the latest invitations had been sent out. I am sure he was not thrilled by my “we’ll certainly keep you in mind for future educational opportunities,” but I didn’t feel too bad about this one. It was a tough, unfortunate situation.

SCENARIO 3: You unexpectedly receive grant funding for a live activity taking place in 6 weeks. You need to find 2 faculty willing to travel onsite, in the middle of the work week, to serve as presenters.

WHAT CAN YOU DO: One approach would be to quietly reach out to anyone and everyone you have worked with on this topic to “test the waters” before sending out a formal invitation. Because you don’t have time to waste, you may need to “over-invite” once again and then hope for the best. I suppose you could push back and tell the funder, “We can’t pull this off in 6 weeks. Can we submit a change of scope for next year?” though that would likely be the last resort.

WHAT I DID: I started contacting people we had worked with before to see if they had any flexibility in their schedules for a midweek symposium presentation. After receiving a whole slew of “Sorry, we have patients that day and I can’t simply walk away from that,” we finally lucked into a faculty member who was going to be in the geographic vicinity for another meeting the next day. She was able to change her travel schedule to fit it our activity. Our second faculty member was local and was able to take a few hours off to drive to the activity. Crisis averted.

I like these sort of real-world scenarios, especially ones that are a bit nuanced but happen to the best of us. These would be great submissions for our Ask Us Anything feature, by the way. We’ll have our February installment next month. 

If you missed previous segments of the CMEslinger saga, you can read them here:

• Part 1
• Part 2

And now, our latest segment:

Part 3 (Derek)
As time continued its relentless march forward, the CMEslinger was forced to face the harsh reality that he was never going to catch the man in black at his current pace. He needed to take action, and he needed to do it now.

Reining the pony to a halt, he shielded his flinty grey eyes with the gnarled right hand whose pinkie finger was starting to have trouble reaching the shift button on his keyboard. Scanning the horizon, he caught a glint of sunlight bouncing off the tin roof of a farmhouse a quarter mile to the west. He gave the pony a gentle nudge with his heels and headed in the direction of the farmhouse at a trot.

As he neared the house, he noticed two things immediately. One was the mud spattered Jeep Wrangler in the dirt driveway that was so filthy it was impossible to determine the color of the paint job. The second was the silver haired woman clad in faded jeans and a chambray shirt, seated at what looked like an old school desk that someone had dragged onto the front porch of the farmhouse. She had a beat-up old Lenovo Thinkpad in front of her and was typing on it with such force that the clacking of the keys drowned out the angry curses emanating from her mouth.

The sound of hoofbeats eventually reached the ears of the furious typist, and she glanced up from the laptop with the surly look of a trapped wolverine. Her expression softened when she noticed the CMEslinger approaching, and she rose to greet him.

“Well, howdy there stranger. I apologize for the unkind words you might have heard just now. I don’t get too many visitors in this here neck of the woods.”

The CMEslinger nodded with a slight grin. “No apologies needed, ma’am. I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. If you don’t mind me asking, what’s got you typing madder than a bear with her paw stuck in a hornet’s nest?”

The woman gave a short laugh and a helpless shrug. “I appreciate your concern, mister, but it’s nothing you can help with. I work for the local health center, and I keep getting my dang CME grant proposals rejected. To make matters worse, won’t nobody give me a good reason why. It’s incredibly frustratin’!”

His grin growing even broader, the CMEslinger slid off his horse and gave the woman a brief nod of his head. “Ma’am, today just might be your lucky day. Let me take a look at one of those proposals. Perhaps we can work out some kind of a deal…”

(Three hours later)

“Las Vegas 300 miles,” read the road sign now rapidly shrinking in the Wrangler’s rearview mirror. The CMEslinger was making excellent time now that he was able to trade the pony and a few hours consulting for a temporary lease of the silver-haired woman’s muddy Jeep. It only took the CMEslinger a few minutes to scan one of her grant proposals to realize she was stuck in a CME time warp where non-referenced needs assessments and standalone live conferences without a tandem enduring program were the norm. It took him a bit longer to explain how she should update her approach to program planning and instructional design, but once he reviewed and gave a thumbs up to her freshly written executive summary, their deal was set.

The CMEslinger looked at the dashboard clock, grimaced, and gave the Wrangler more gas. He had to get moving.

If you missed Part 1 of the CMEslinger saga, you can click here to read it.

Part 2 (Scott)

It hadn’t always been like this, of course.

There was a time when the CMEslinger and the man in black were the industry’s dynamic duo, groomed by Phinneas not only to eventually take over his mantle, but to surpass his myriad accomplishments. They worked hand in hand on everything — project management, accreditation, outcomes, business development – there was nothing they couldn’t do. So feverishly did the CMEslinger and the man in black collaborate that they eventually knocked down the wall that separated their lavish offices so they could communicate through the mere expression on their faces.

Six satellite symposia in two days? No problem.

An unexpected visit from an ACCME site surveyor on Christmas Eve? Piece of cake.

That overzealous new employee who swore a P value of 0.08 was “good enough” for their company’s outcomes reports? They escorted her out the door arm in arm.

“Just remember boys,” Phinneas always told them. “The best of the good things are never great enough for you.”

But then came “The Incident,” and things were never the same. It was an unspeakable breach of trust that the CMEslayer refused to talk about with any of his four ex-wives. Even Ned, his favorite bartender at The Last Straw, got the cold shoulder when he asked, “Say there old timer, what happened to that friend of yours? Haven’t seen him ‘round these parts in a while.” The wounds were too deep, the damage too destructive.

Yet as the CMEslayer wiped his gritty hands on his black leather chaps, his soul couldn’t help but cry out as the memories of past glories flooded back. This was why he spurred on his palomino across the wind-swept plains, why he ignored the pangs of hunger in his ample belly, why he continued on for hours and hours getting closer…closer…closer to the final showdown.

The conference was in 36 hours and the man in black was far, far in the distance. He could no longer see the plumes of smoke from the 2014 Ford F250 rental, but he could see the scowl of the man in black on the horizon. He had to get moving.