As all 4,256 loyal followers of the CMEpaloooza blog know, prior to every biannual broadcast, we do a special event where we challenge you to find answers to some really piercing questions on the websites of some of our valued Sponsors. There has been CMEpalooza Pursuit!! and CMEpalooza Scavenger Hunt!!, but the all-time favorite seems to be CMEpalooza Bingo!!

Perhaps it’s because so many of you spend your Friday nights down at your local community VFW holding tightly to your lucky talismans as you pray for “O 68”, but man, you guys love your Bingo.

And so, CMEpalooza Bingo!! is back again this fall.

But there is a catch. Partly because we have too many sponsors to fit onto a Bingo card (27 of ’em) and partly because, well, we wanted to make some tweaks to generate more interest, there are a few new rules.

Here goes:

STEP 1: Download all of the necessary Bingo forms by clicking on this link. That will give you the Bingo board, the Bingo questions, and the Bingo answer sheet. You should also queue up our Sponsor page, which will give you direct links to all of the websites you will need to visit.

STEP 2: A successful entry involves completing a Bingo – it can be horizontal (that’s straight across), vertical (that’s up and down), or diagonal (that’s, um, diagonal).

Wrinkle No. 1: A successful entry also involves completing the clue for one of our two Gold sponsors – Academy for Continued Healthcare Learning or Genentech. So a total of six (6) answers are necessary this year for a successful entry. I can hear you whining already about the extra work, but hey, think of all the interesting information you are going to learn about our industry!

STEP 3: Email your completed form to me at scott@medcasewriter.com along with a witty subject line (witty subject line is optional). Entry deadline is 11:59 p.m. ET on Sunday, September 30.

Wrinkle No. 2: You can enter up to 3 times this year, but you need to complete a unique Bingo for each entry (yes, you can repeat the Gold sponsor question). You can even send all of your submissions to me in a single bulk email. Every entry is another chance to win our grand prize.

STEP 4: Wait until the morning of Monday, October 1, when we will have the CMEpalooza Bingo!! prize drawing in the law offices of Simmons, Fultz, and Brown (note from Derek: I see what you did there).

Wrinkle No. 3: In past years, we had multiple winners of smallish prizes ($25-100). This year, we are doing away with the piddling stuff and simply giving away one single $500 prize. That’s right, $500. What might you do with $500? I guess it depends on your personal preference, but here are some practical ideas courtesy of The Motley Fool website – pay down your credit cards, make an extra mortgage payment, buy life insurance. Here are some less practical ideas courtesy of me – buy a football autographed by Carson Wentz, a 2-oz tin of Beluga caviar, or a George Costanza signed and framed baseball card.

Sounds simple enough, right? Yes, yes it does. So get cracking there, chipmunk.

5. You don’t need to travel anywhere to watch. Unless you are the type of person who loves waking up early, fighting traffic to the airport, parking, waiting in the security line, taking off your belt and shoes, putting your belt and shoes back on, sitting in an uncomfortable seat while trying to get work done using the airport’s spotty Wifi, buying an overpriced coffee at the airport coffee shop, shouldering through the crowd of people gathered around the entrance gate even though their zone hasn’t been called yet, sitting in an uncomfortable seat while trying to get work done using the airplane’s spotty Wifi, bonking your head on the airplane ceiling when you stand up to de-plane (that might just be me), waiting for a taxi/Uber/Lyft to take you to your hotel, checking in at the hotel, registering at the conference, and finally sitting down at a round table with ice water and those weird fruity candies — not needing to travel is a nice perk.

4. It’s a good excuse to binge-watch Season 7 of Game of Thrones. This goes along with reason #5 — if you don’t need to travel anywhere, then you can tell your boss you are going to stay at home to watch CMEpalooza Fall and not have to deal with constant distractions, like Larry from accounting always stopping by your office to tell you about his Fantasy Football team (nobody cares, Larry!) And while I would never encourage anyone to do this, since all of the CMEpalooza Fall sessions are recorded and immediately archived, you theoretically could spend the day watching all of season 7 of Game of Thrones in order to catch up before season 8 begins, and then watch the archived versions of the palooza sessions later on. I’m not saying you should do this, just that you could do this. If you wanted to. (Side note: my wife would like to recommend everyone binge-watch Outlander instead, which she claims is just as good as Game of Thrones. My counter to this is: does Outlander have dragons? No. Does it have zombies? No. Does it have zombie dragons? No. Then it’s not as good as Game of Thrones. Point for me.)

3. Scott might do something nuts. Tap dance routine? Tuvan throat singing? New tattoo reveal? You never know with that guy. Tune in to find out!

2. Have you seen the agenda? Seriously, have you? It’s quite good.

1. It’s free. Always has been and always will be. I mean, if you want to pay us a registration fee just out of habit, that’s fine, we’ll take it. I’m not actually sure how we would do that, but we could figure it out. Maybe bitcoin or something? On second thought, forget it. Please don’t pay us a registration fee even if you want to. It will just lead to more emails back and forth between Scott and me arguing about how to set up a Venmo account on the website and I’ll end up saying something about trusting the process and Scott will throw out a reference to some obscure 80’s sitcom I’ve never heard of and we already spend way too much time doing this and don’t need an excuse to do it more. So, back to my original point: CMEpalooza is free!

Earlier this summer, I was invited to give a presentation via webinar to the Colorado Alliance for CME (CACME) entitled, “The CMEpalooza Experience: What Can CME Providers Learn From It?” For now, we’ll ignore the fact that at least 15 people likely turned down an invitation before the meeting planners were forced to scrape the bottom of the barrel and invite me (I’m not offended). Instead, we’ll choose to focus on the presentation itself.

I must admit that when they chose this topic from a list of possible ones I sent to them, it was somewhat daunting. It’s just not something I had ever thought about. CMEpalooza is just something that Derek and I do – we don’t spend hours thinking about how we do it or why we do it, and that’s probably a good thing. Neither of us has enough brain cells to waste on that sort of advanced level thinking, and we’d probably just gum up the works even more than we usually do anyway.

But since I didn’t want to disappoint what were surely hundreds of rabid CME/CE professionals (I couldn’t see them so let’s just pretend there were more than 5 people in the audience), I spent a few hours trying to come up with something worthwhile. And, well, since I spent a few hours coming up with something for those hundreds of folks, I thought I’d share some of the highlights with the thousands of you reading this today. It’s called “repurposing content.”

So without further ado, here are the lessons you can learn from CMEpalooza and apply to your day-to-day:

1. Throw things against the wall. Most won’t stick. But some of them will!
   CMEpalooza as a whole is one of those things that Derek threw against the wall that stuck. Things like CMEpalooza Spotlight didn’t. It happens. Take chances with your CME programming – there is nothing that makes our job duller than trotting out the same formats over and over. Some of my most rewarding successes – and yes, abysmal failures – have been in trying something different.
2. Utilize online platforms to the best of their capabilities
   There are a lot of online delivery platforms with fancy bells and whistles available to us these days. It’s important to understand what each one offers and tailor your activity based on the capabilities of each individual platform. For instance, we use Google Hangouts for our CMEpalooza broadcasts – it’s a video-based platform where you can bring multiple people together in the same “room” to talk through things. Showing slides can be a bit clunky. Therefore, we emphasize panel discussions in lieu of heavy slide decks. That’s a very basic example, but I’m hoping get what I mean.
3. Partner with the right people
   There is nothing worse than being stuck on a project for months with people who you don’t like, who don’t pull their weight, or offer excuses when things don’t get done on time. Sometimes, you are stuck working with people due to circumstances you cannot control, but there are times when you enter into a partnership willingly that quickly goes south for various reasons. Just be careful. As much as I poke fun at Derek through our blog, he’s actually pretty good to work with once you get past his Philadelphia 76ers fanboi qualities and his strange infatuation with Justine Bateman. Just don’t tell him I told you that (note from Derek: Wait a minute…did Scott just say something nice about me?? Wow! I will be writing about this in my diary tonight…).
4. Develop a consistent marketing strategy
   This is one I’ll chalk up to pure luck. I certainly don’t ever remember sitting down with Derek and saying, “I think we should try to market CMEpalooza as a fun, come-as-you-are kind of meeting that covers serious topics without taking ourselves too seriously.” It just kind of happened that way, probably in part due to our personalities. But hey, it works for us, and we’ve just kind of gone along with it. Listen, marketing CME activities is difficult. VERY difficult. You are trying to reach an audience that probably considers a lot of what we offer to be ambient noise that they’d rather ignore. Nonetheless, there are many CME providers who have created a unique “personality” that they use to drive their marketing. I think it’s a good strategy.
5. Build your professional network in a way that makes you comfortable
   Derek and I aren’t the most socially outgoing people in the world, and it’s probably gotten worse for both of us since we started working from home. We’re not to the point where we need to talk to a volleyball to keep us company (at least I’m not [Derek: no comment]), but we’re also not the people who are going to walk into a room and suddenly grab everyone’s attention. For me at least, CMEpalooza is the way I meet a lot of people in our industry. It’s partially why we include so many new faces in each iteration of our event – not only do we get to present different viewpoints to our audience, but it also broadens our personal professional network. Building relationships outside of your day-to-day walls is crucial to a rewarding career. There is no downside to getting to know good people who may become educational partners in the future (see item #3). Figure out a way to get to know them can be tricky and will depend upon your personality, but it’s not something you should ignore.
6. Don’t take yourself too seriously – it’s just a job people
   Q: Why can’t your nose be 12 inches long?
   A: Because then it would be a foot