You were planning your in-person CME event, and all was going smoothly. You had all your activities ready and your presenters were in place. Then came the unexpected, pandemic-imposed challenges that left you reeling. You had to do a full pivot into what your event would now become.
The decision to transition to a virtual format was difficult: after all, how could you increase your event’s attendance when everyone was anticipating a live one? Can you actually accomplish this? And with your LMS?
In this post, we tell you about using an LMS to increase CME event attendance.
The Story of a Cardiology Event: How They Got It Right
It took the American College of Cardiology (ACC) event team fifteen days to regroup and transform their CME event into a virtual model when their Chicago-based annual meeting was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
For their virtual event, the ACC chose twenty-four sessions to livestream and decided to pre-record the rest of their content for on-demand access.
The results: Within thirty minutes of the session opening, 13,000 people logged in from around the world. The success continued. By the end of the three-day event, over 34,000 unique visitors had logged in for the live or prerecorded sessions. Ninety days after the event, the ACC had 63,000 unique users who had logged in to access the conference’s content.
In another example, the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) was planning on holding its conference with 44,000 registered attendees. They measured their total content views, and the results were staggering: there were more than 2.5 million content views during the meeting. In social media, more than 8,800 Twitter users posted more than 45,000 tweets using the #ASCO20 hashtag, generating 750 million likes, shares, and comments.
How to Use Your LMS for Your CME Event at the Very Beginning
Preparing for a virtual CME event can be daunting, especially if you have to transition from a live event quickly and are not certain if you’ll have the number of attendees that you originally expected from the original in-person event. Using an LMS to increase event attendance offers a wide range of features and benefits.
Use your LMS for pre-event registration. You can leverage its authoring tools that are designed to make it possible to create and add agendas for single or multi-track events. You’ll be ready to take registrations and salvage your previously planned group events with these benefits:
- Commerce support for individual sessions or full track purchasing
- Email notices about your event
- Support for over fifty credit types, including those for AMA, ANCC, ACPE, and MOC.
- Leverage robust registration reporting tools to derive important insights from your data
What about Using Your LMS for Live Events?
Get your CME event attendees excited. Boost attention, and announce that your event is happening via the email functionality of your LMS. Keep them updated with agendas, and post on the latest developments for the event.
When using an LMS to increase CME event attendance, you can provide integration with Zoom Meeting and GoToWebinar. Both provide seamless attendance tracking and reporting. Your attendees can also access their sessions directly from the LMS. There’s no need to worry about having a second login at the conference site.
You can also obtain attendance reports on each registrant to ensure compliance for credit claiming. There’s immediate access to session evaluations and credit claiming if this is configured. Your LMS should also offer automated external credit reporting, such as PARS, JA-PARS, CE Broker, and CPE Monitor.
Post Event: What Your LMS Can Do
Using an LMS to increase CME event attendance goes beyond the event itself. Your LMS should make it easy to convert the proceedings into enduring content, extending the reach of your event. Here is how you can further provide valuable CME content to your attendees afterward:
- You can make recordings from Zoom Meeting available immediately in the LMS. You won’t need to download, convert, and upload large video files.
- The use of Course Cloning enables you to easily provide the enduring version of the meeting. You add the pre- and post-test and the evaluation, and it’s complete and ready to go to individuals who were unable to attend the event.
Get Your Virtual CME Event Ready in the Best Way Possible with EthosCE
It’s critical to get things done right the first time when it comes to your virtual CME event’s success. With EthosCE, you have the tools to take your CME event to the next level and provide the best experience for your attendees.
At EthosCE, we understand the challenges of staying up to date and compliant with ACCME changes. We know how critical it is to get things done right the first time when it comes to team-based education and success.
To learn how EthosCE can enhance the continuing education of your healthcare teams, schedule a free 1-on-1 demo with one of our specialists today!
