I’ve had to stop and restart this post a bunch of times already because it keeps devolving into a long-winded political rant that makes me sound like an old-man-yells-at-cloud blowhard and no one wants to read political rants from old-man-yells-at-cloud blowhards [insert joke about Scott here]. So, let me try this one more time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately and what it means to be part of a community. Inspired by recent events, I’ve been working my way through Congressman John Lewis’s graphic novel series March, which, if you haven’t read it already, you definitely should. As a key figure in the civil rights movement, Lewis is inspirational in his commitment to his cause despite facing overwhelming racism and adversity. He excels as a community organizer and shows how amazing things can be accomplished when a group of people are willing to work together towards a common goal.

Now, I know what you all are thinking right now. “Oh no! Derek is not going to try to compare his work with CMEpalooza to John Lewis and the civil rights movement, is he??” Rest assured, I am not. As my dad likes to say — I may be dumb, but I ain’t stupid. No, mostly it just made me think about (cue the sappy orchestral number) what a unique and supportive community we have in the CME/CE world. It’s relatively small, we all go to the same conferences, work with the same people, apply for the same grants, have similar problems, have similar work-related experiences, yet we are all working towards a similar goal: improving patient care.

If you work in this industry for a few years, you get to know people pretty well without even really trying. And lets face it, our jobs are sort of…odd. I think we have all had the same experience of trying to explain our job to someone who has innocently asked, “What do you do?” Maybe it’s just my poor ability to explain, but more than once I’ve had a questioner respond, “You have a weird job.” True. So, we all sit around in the hotel lobby bar at the Alliance conference and bond over the shared oddity of our jobs. It’s what we do, and it’s part of what makes us a community. And while many of us are technically competitors in this community, it’s important to keep in mind that we are all on the same side. We can continue to make strides in improving patient care on our own, but we can do even more if we are willing to work together. Keep that in mind during your discussions and interactions next week.

Scott and I will both be at the Alliance conference, and we’re both pretty approachable guys, though Scott likes to tell bad jokes and I talk about the Sixers too much. If any of you have any questions about CMEpalooza — be it technical questions, or questions about sponsorship possibilities, or questions about our development process for the Spring agenda — or even if you just want to chat, please feel free to grab either one of us. Personally, I’m interested in finding a wider range of faculty for CMEpalooza, so if you have any interest in speaking, let me know. And if you’re interested in hearing my thoughts on Joel Embiid’s breakout rookie season, you can let me know that, too…

This is always one of the most challenging blog posts of the year to write. Neither Derek nor I are natural salesmen (especially Derek – his daughter pleaded with him last spring to ask his co-workers to each buy a single box of Thin Mints to support her girl scout troop. She was grounded indefinitely due to “the audacity to make such a preposterous request” [dw note: FAKE NEWS! My daughter has never been part of the girl scouts. The statement about my salesmanship, however, is wholly accurate. Carry on…]).

Meeting folks use all sorts of fancy tricks and numbers to substantiate why sponsors (or more commonly, exhibitors) should spend money to have a presence at their events. Typically, this surrounds attracting attention and potential clients to their organizations, and there is certainly nothing remarkably misleading about this tactic. Hey, we do it too.

So yes, you can look near the end of our Sponsor prospectus to get a sense of the CMEpalooza audience and our annual reach (spoiler alert: it’s a lot of people).

But at its core, the value of CMEpalooza sponsorship is the opportunity to be a part of something that is both valuable to the CME community and, well, fun. Let’s face it – we don’t exactly color within the lines when it comes to some of our promotional efforts. I’m particularly proud of my A Few Good Men parody from 2015 and my mea culpa last fall regarding old leaked audio of a conversation Derek and I had years ago. Derek gets giddy writing his bizarre awesome [dw note: fixed your typo] CMEpalooza haikus.

Last year, we extended some of the fun to sponsor “events” such as #CMEpalooza Challenge and CMEpalooza Bingo!! I have no idea what we’ll have in store as a spring promotional event, but I promise that there will be something and that it will be focused on bringing attention to the good and unique work all of our sponsors do.

Now a few truths:

We can’t promise that if you sponsor CMEpalooza, your business will grow by a guaranteed 20% this year.

We can’t promise that if you sponsor CMEpalooza, you will suddenly be flooded with phone calls saying, “Hey, I read about you guys on the CMEpalooza website and I’m really interested in learning more about your organization.”

We can’t promise that if you sponsor CMEpalooza, you will win Powerball this year.

What we can promise is that you will find your CMEpalooza sponsorship to have some value and that you will be proud to be associated with us. If your business does grow by 20% this year and if you do get that deluge of phone calls and if you do win Powerball, we’ll of course happily take all of the credit (and 20% of your winnings).

All we ask if that you are scratching your head and thinking, “Hmm, maybe…” that you take a gander at our Sponsorship Prospectus. We offer a bunch of different potential goodies – the higher your level of financial support, the more goodie-ness you get (please won’t someone save CMEpalooza Company Spotlight?)

Derek even promises to throw in a free box of Thin Mints for all of this Spring’s sponsors. Once his daughter is allowed out of her room.

Technically, pitchers and catchers won’t report for nearly 2 months (it’s a baseball thing in case you are scratching your head and muttering, “Let me guess, another random sports reference? Don’t these guys watch Gilmore Girls?”). And while the first mitts won’t emerge from hibernation until the calendar trickles a little more quickly toward spring, it’s not too soon at CMEpalooza headquarters for us to throw out our first curveball of the year.

Now in truth, Derek and I saw no need to do anything differently with CMEpalooza Spring – I mean, why mess with a good thing? – but our crack team of interns begged and pleaded with us for many months to try something new. If the two of us have learned nothing after a combined 29 years of marriage, it’s how to put the seat down how to listen. So we caved.

Here is how we used to devise our spring agenda:

About this time of year, we would open up a call for abstracts on our website. People would spend many hours talking to colleagues to come up with something that would be eye-catching and worthy of a CMEpalooza session. We’d then open up the abstracts to peer voting, which would put about 7 or 8 sessions on the agenda.

Unfortunately, simply due to the numbers game, there were far more winners than losers, which we know is discouraging and leads people to think they’ve wasted their time coming up with an idea and coaxing their colleagues to join them on the prospective session. We saw interest in coming up with unique ideas for sessions dwindling, which isn’t a good thing. We loved the peer voting process and were determined to find a way to keep it, but we decided to tinker with the submission process.

So here is our new and improved approach in devising our spring agenda:

We have come up with 6 session categories — Accreditation, Industry, Off-the-Wall/Potpourri, Outcomes, Educational Design, and Case-Based Formats — and are in the process of working with some of our most loyal fans to come up with ideas for sessions in each of those categories.

Our hope is that by early February we’ll be able to present to you a slate of options to vote on in each category. These will only be titles and descriptions of the focus of the sessions themselves – there will be no pre-determined faculty, so no one will waste time recruiting folks for sessions that may hit the scrap heap.

The voting process will work in a similar fashion to previous years, except that you will only be able to vote for 1 session in each category. The winning session in each category gets added to the agenda, and the process of recruiting faculty then begins (our interns will be busy).

This approach, we hope, has the added bonus of giving us a more balanced agenda with a greater variety of topics. While there is nothing necessarily wrong about having, say, four sessions focused on Outcomes, we are going to be moving away from that possibility. We understand if you will shed some tears, but we promise that, in the end, we’ll have a better, brighter program for everyone.

Now let’s say you have been sitting on an idea for a CMEpalooza session for months, just waiting for your chance to unleash it on the world. There is a part of us that would be worried for your sanity – I mean, come on, we know our limits here — but another part is thinking, “Great! We won’t let your idea go to waste!” Simply come up with a title and a brief yet pithy description of your proposed session, fire off an email with all that information to either myself or Derek, and we’ll include your idea in the voting process. We’ll even present it anonymously in case you are embarrassed of public ridicule.

The deadline for sending something to us is Friday, February 3. Don’t worry – we’ll send some reminders out.