BREAKING NEWS! The Alliance 2017 Annual Meeting is coming up in a few days! (Yes, I’m mocking CNN who uses the “Breaking News” chyron like it’s a name badge.) I imagine a good amount of you reading this are planning to head out to San Fran for the conference, but a fair amount of you will be staying at home (yeesh, what a great observation by me. “Some of you are going and some of you aren’t.” Brilliant. This is the type of insightful analysis the CMEpalooza blog has become famous for. I should have made Scott write this post. I need more coffee.)

Hey, I get it. We can’t all go the conference every year, and it’s expensive to send an entire staff. I didn’t go last year. Here’s a picture of me thinking about all my friends at the conference while I stayed home:

But I come with good news! Oh yes, it’s very exciting times here at CMEpalooza HQ. So exciting that Scott jumped up and danced a little jig (it was…not great.) That’s right, folks — the CMEpalooza archive has been updated! Woooooo!!!

[crickets]

Fine. It might not be that exciting, but it is a nice resource. I added all the sessions from CMEpalooza Fall 2016 to the archive and we now have over 60 sessions in 11 different categories for your viewing pleasure (side note: they are free). So, while your boss is away at the Alliance conference during your free time, pop on over to the archive and check out some of the sessions you may have missed. Interested in learning more about evaluation and outcomes? We have 18 sessions in our Outcomes section. If you watch them all, we’ll give you our special Master of Outcomes sash, which you will be required to wear around the office and everyone has to refer to you as “The Outcomes Master.”

“Hey, do you have any suggestions for improving our evaluation response rates?”

“Beats me. Let’s ask The Outcomes Master.”

“You mean Larry?”

“That’s his old name.”

And there’s lots of other topics to browse through. Check it out!

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.