In the “classic” baseball movie Field of Dreams (I put “classic” in quotations because I know some of you will balk at the suggestion), James Earl Jones suggests to Kevin Costner that the one constant through all the years has been baseball. I will suggest to you, dear reader, that the one constant through all the years of CME programming we have had, is…how do I get people to respond to my dang surveys!?

OK, maybe I’m being a little facetious, but for as long as I have been working in CME (going on 15 years now), response rates to surveys has been a problem. We’re all constantly looking for new, cost-effective ways to get an increased number of people to complete our surveys, evaluations, etc. With that in mind, I’m really looking forward to Boyce Byerly’s 10:30 AM ET CMEpalooza session on Improving Response Rates on CME Surveys. Check out our “Sneak Peek” video with Boyce below for a nice summary of what he’ll be covering.

Side note: proving once again that I will never be a professional moderator, this video starts out a little abruptly as I forgot to tell everyone when we were going live and I had just finished shushing them when the video starts. As usual, I look like a doofus.

I have a confession to make: I…am a Philadelphia 76ers fan. Not a lukewarm-fair-weather-occasionally-catches-a-game-on-TV-when-they’re-playing-Golden-State-or-LeBron fan, but a dyed-in-the-wool-rarely-misses-a-game-even-when-they’re-losing-by-30-again fan. I grew up watching Dr. J and Moses battling Larry Bird and the hated Boston Celtics (I’m not one to condone fighting, but this is one of my all-time favorite moments in the history of that storied rivalry), named my dog after my favorite Sixer (Charles Barkley), and was in the stands when Allen Iverson and crew beat the Milwaukee Bucks in the 2001 Eastern Conference Finals. They’re my team til’ death do us part.

Lately, the team has been…not good. Pretty bad, actually. OK, historically awful. I think it’s fair to say that the 2015-2016 Sixers will go down in history as one of the worst professional basketball teams of all time. They have currently won 8 games and lost 51. And yet, my love for the team has only increased. In fact, this past Friday night I attended the game with 300 other listeners of a Sixers-themed podcast so we could all sit in a group and yell chants in support of embattled team GM Sam Hinkie (you can read a little blurb about us here). Sounds great, right? A friend of mine asked the obvious question —  why? This is how I explained it to her.

Imagine an NBA team stuck in perpetual mediocrity. They hire a new GM who decides the best way to win a championship is to trade away all the decent players, be terrible for several years, and then begin rebuilding from scratch with young players via the draft. The majority of fans hate what has become known as “The Process” and think they should be better right now. A small loyal contingent of fans are all in on “The Process” and think it’s already working, despite the current horribleness of the team. We believe in what Sam Hinkie is doing. We trust “The Process.”

Trust the process. Have faith in the system that has been built. Believe it will work. This is what Scott and I do every time we have a CMEpalooza (Note from Scott: Give yourself a high five if you’ve read far enough to get to the CMEpalooza segue. Puntua Lortu Warnick!). And every time, we have people who come into it doubtful of how well it will work. They don’t usually tell us beforehand, but every palooza we have a presenter or two who, upon using Google Hangouts for the first time remarks, “Hey — this works really well!” We still get comments on our evaluations from participants commenting on how smoothly the event went. They didn’t trust the process before, but they do now.

Quite frankly, I’m surprised more people in the CME/CE community haven’t taken advantage of the Google Hangout technology. I’ll give you two quick reasons why you should at least check it out:

1. It works.
2. It’s free.

Listen — I figured out how to put on an entire conference using only Google Hangouts and I’m not that smart (At least, my son seems to think I’m not. Here’s a blurb from a recent conversation we had):

Son: “We had a practice TerraNova test at school today.”
Me: “OK…”
Son: “You know what I mean by ‘practice’?”
Me: “I’m familiar with that word, yes.”
Son: “It means it wasn’t a real test. It doesn’t count or anything.”
Me: “Right. I got it.”
Son: “OK, I just wanted to make sure you understood what I meant.”

On the other hand, I was a key member of the Holy Cannolis, winner of the OMC Trivia Night fundraiser on Saturday night [it was a busy weekend]. I contributed with an absurd knowledge of bad ’90s pop songs [the name of that Spice Girls song is Wannabe], bad 80’s TV themes [nailed both Growing Pains and Who’s the Boss?], and Bible trivia [the name of John the Baptist’s father was Zechariah. My wife — who is officially 200 SAT points smarter than me and a preacher’s kid to boot — tried to insist it was Ezekiel. For shame, dear. For shame.] But I digress…)

The point of all this is that every year we run two CMEpaloozas and every year they both run just fine. We have little glitches here and there, but overall it works great. The major reason it works so well is the technology we use. It’s not us (well, maybe it’s us a little). It’s Google Hangouts. It works for us and it will work for you. Give it a try.

Trust me. Trust the process.

Sometimes, I have ideas that work (yay CMEpalooza! 🙂 ).

Sometimes, I have ideas that don’t work (poor CMEpalooza Spotlight 😦 ).

Sometimes, I have ideas that work…until I get an email telling me it’s been copyrighted and if I want to keep doing it, I need to do A, B, C, and D (and D = $$$).

Yes, the PechaKucha police finally caught up to Scott and I — the Bonnie and Clyde of CME (Scott’s Bonnie, of course) — and have put an end to our scofflaw ways. CME PechaKucha is no more.

I’m being a bit dramatic. We received a very friendly email from someone with the PechaKucha organization (I didn’t know there was an organization) telling us that “PechaKucha” is, in fact, copyrighted (I didn’t know it was copyrighted) and that we could continue to call it a PechaKucha if we changed a few things and gave a donation to the organization. I’m sure it’s a very nice organization, but neither Scott nor I saw much point in the donation and we weren’t big fans of their changes, either. Ultimately, we decided to put an end to CME PechaKucha. We had a good run (cue a rousing version of “Danny Boy”).

In place of CME PechaKucha, I’d like to introduce our newest idea — CME Puntua Lortu! Yes, we’re very excited about CME Puntua Lortu and we think you will be, too. I’ve included a quick little FAQ to help introduce it.

How is CME Puntua Lortu different than CME PechaKucha? Well, we are using the words “Puntua Lortu” — which are not copyrighted — in place of the words “PechaKucha” — which are copyrighted. Other than that, it’s pretty much the same.

What the heck does “Puntua Lortu” mean? When I was a boy, my Spanish grandfather used to set me on his knee and ask me what I had learned that day in school. I would go on and on and on, telling him about my day with extremely long-winded stories. He would look at me, and with his thick Basque accent say, “Derekimo! Puntua Lortu! (Get to the point!)” I thought it was an apt phrase for a presentation style that is all about getting to the point.

(OK, I made that story up. I thought it sounded better than the real story, which is that I put “get to the point” in Google Translate and checked different languages until I found one that sounded cool. Basque won.)

Who will be presenting during CME Puntua Lortu? We have a great group of folks lined up. The title of their presentations may change between now and CMEpalooza Spring, but this is what we have for now:

Designing Information with Impact
Bhaval Shah, PhD, infograph-ed, LLC.

Walking the Talk
Don Harting, Harting Communications LLC

The Fallacy Fallacy in Medical Literature
Bonny P. McClain, Data & Donuts

A Pecha Kucha Approach to CME Project Management
Venkata (Raja) Akunuru, CHCP, PMP, DLC Solutions and EthosCE LMS

7 Minutes in CPD Heaven – A Sprint through the 2016 ACEHP Annual Meeting
Ted Singer, PVI, PeerView Institute for Medical Education 

For those of you who are waiting to see what else is on our Spring agenda, it’s coming soon. Promise.