Pele once said that no individual can win a game by themself. So we're going to be talking collaboration today. I'm a big fan of quotes, so you'll learn that the more we get to work together. Also, and this is very true, and this is something I've shared with my team, revenue development is no longer about interrupting, pitching, and closing. It's all about listening, diagnosing, and prescribing. And that's very true now, as we'll see in some case studies. My name is Jason Keith. I'm Senior Director of Corporate Relations, Marketing, and Communications with the American Society of Colon and Rectal Surgeons. We're talking today about revenue diversification, and joining me is Patricia Banks, the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing and Development Officer for the American Urological Association. Jennifer Regala, Director of Publications for the American Urological Association and Journal of Urology. Eric Muehlbauer, Executive Director, North American Spine Society, and Jody Talia, Senior Vice President, Business Development, American College of Emergency Physicians, and Managing Director of Emergency Medicine Foundation. So without any further delay, we are going to turn it over to Jennifer and Priscilla to get us started. Thank you very much, Jason, let me make sure this is working, great. I am not Priscilla, I am Patricia, I work with the American Neurological Association, I'm really excited to be here with my colleague today, Jennifer Regale. to share with you a little bit about some of the new creative things we've done internally to break down silos and diversify our revenue. Before I jump into our story, I thought I would share with you just a little bit our learning objectives and sort of being here today. And the first is to learn and talk, obviously, about diversification of revenue. The other is to share with you some of our stories and learn about developing revenue, new revenue or expanding revenue to support new mission-based projects. For example, supporting patient initiatives or DEI initiatives. And then the other is really just as we walk through, you know, our time together, having an open discussion about what we're doing, how it might apply to you, and here are some of what you're doing and hopefully take away some learnings as well. So I thought I would start with just a little bit of background to sort of set the story that we're going to talk about today. So we have in our organization a publications department. They oversee our three scholarly publications plus our official newsletter. We also have an industry relations and development team. We refer to them as IR&D. I'm sure most of your associations have very similar departments. Our IR&D team oversees sales, so sponsorships, exhibits, grants, and pretty much everything related to sales with industry and related partners. So in 2020, we sort of had this convergence of a lot of things happening in the world and within our association. So I'm sort of setting the stage for the story that I'm going to tell. So in 2020, we had these two departments that had some pretty significant changes in their management and in their staffing. As that happened, we restructured and these two departments were moved into the marketing and communications division. So they became part of a little bit of a bigger team, which opened up some collaboration opportunities. Also it was a team with a little bit of a different type of culture. So almost at exactly the same time, like literally 30 to 60 days later, we had COVID and we all shut down and went home. This of course for everybody was a huge, huge seismic shift in the way that we worked and lived our lives, particularly though for those two teams, because they really, really had to relook at the way that they were doing their job. They had to modernize their processes. They had to look for different efficiencies. They had to use technology in a way that they hadn't done before. So we had a lot of things happening at the same time. Also economically, as COVID hit, I'm sure some of you had the same experience with your partners. You also, annual meetings were canceled. Industry partners were kind of putting money on hold. So a lot of different things happening at the same time. So prior to this, the teams, those two teams really hadn't worked very much together. They were really very, very different silos. So we have this new sort of situation. They're part of a different division. And as a division, we meet every month. It's a big division, about 40 some people. So we all come together. And we just talk about what's keeping us up at night. What are the issues we're facing? What are some of the wins that we've had and things that are coming up? So it was at one of these meetings that Jennifer was there. She was hearing about our industry committee meetings that were coming up. You all probably have something similar. We have one time a year where we bring our industry partners in for a couple days. Our board comes in. We have really wonderful meetings together, brainstorming, strategizing, learning. This really helps with our industry partnerships. So we were talking about this. And Jennifer raised her hand, as she will when you see her, very outgoing, said, can I come? And so we were like, well, maybe. So let's talk about that. So eventually, Jennifer did come. We started to think about, OK, might there be some synergies here that we haven't really looked at before if, you know, publications did show up at this meeting? So as we were having that conversation and thinking, where might some of the opportunities be if our publications team decides to participate in this meeting? We really focused on our newsletter. So pausing just a second, let me give you a little history on the newsletter because it helps sort of set the stage. In 2020, our newsletter, monthly print mail to all of our domestic members, pretty thin, pretty static publication. The only online presence was a digital flip book. I don't even know if that technology still exists today, but, you know, that really old kind of flip book, you can't search anything. And we realized that this was really behind the times. Sales were lagging in that publication as well. So Jennifer and I worked together with the editorial team to really kind of reinvent this publication. We really almost threw it up and kind of started from zero. We remodernized the content. We changed the design. We changed the structure of the editorial board. And then we began to build a digital ecosystem. We built it. It has its own website now. We have a lot of digital components to it. So really, really proud of what we've done with that publication. Just to give you an idea, now in 2023, the content is quadrupled. And there's a whole digital ecosystem that actually is ranked now number two in urology right after our main website. So we're pretty excited about that. But anyway, so going back to my story, so you have this publication. We're like, there might be a lot of synergies here. So we focused on that, on what the synergies might be with that publication. How can we take that existing offering, partner with our industry partners to create new revenue streams? We also realized that, you know, in these industry meetings, we have a lot of our other departments there. Our Office of Education was already attending. Our Office of Research was attending. Guidelines, so on and so forth. So could this also be an opportunity to really talk to some of those departments and create some opportunities with our publications that we weren't realizing up to that point? So Jennifer did attend the meeting. It was a wonderful, wonderful meeting. She continues to attend those to this day. And it was really the beginning of sort of breaking down some of these silos and seeing how we can collaborate. So I'm just going to share two of the success stories, and I'm going to turn it over to Jennifer and let her share some of the other exciting things that have come out of this. But the first, and the one that I'm particularly proud of, is out of that came our AOA Newsworthy Webinars. So these are webinars that we partner with our industry partners with. They can be live. They can be hybrid. They can be recorded. Eventually, the recorded version goes onto our site. It lives there. Depending on the needs of the industry partner, we might take some other content from JU or JPJ or other scholarly publications and create a bundle that lives along with that. We work with our industry partners, and we promote these very heavily, not only before but afterwards, so that you can get people coming back and seeing the webinars. We do this a third Thursday of every month. So we're just doing 12 a year because we're still, you know, the crawl, walk, run. We're still walking pretty close to running right now. And this has been really, really successful. So we've already made well over $200,000, and the, you know, one a month is already booked through June of next year with some verbal commitments on some other months going forward in the year. So I'm pretty confident by February and March, 2024 is going to be booked, and our next big challenge will be, now, how do we create and even maximize more revenue? So this has been a really, really successful outcome of breaking down those silos and collaborating across departments. And this is just a highlight of one of those webinars we did. It was a two-part series, sort of a newsy approach to our guidelines. And then another thing that we're working on right now, we're just piloting this, so we don't have any revenue associated with this yet, but we've been talking to our industry partners, and there's a lot of interest. They're kind of looking for that first proof of concept. So this is what we're calling our Section Selection Podcast. So this is key clinical takeaways from our section. So the way the AOA is, there's a national AOA, and then we have eight sections, regional sections. They're independent. They have their own meetings every year. So right now, they don't really get a whole lot of coverage. So we're like, why don't we be roving reporters, use our residents, use our editorial board to create content based on what's happening at these section meetings? It's a win all the way around. The sections that we've talked to love it, want it, because they're getting exposure for what's happening at their meetings. Industry partners love it because it's an ability for them to sponsor sort of that news content and get it out there in a broad spectrum. So think, for example, to give you an example, AOA Section Selection Podcast from the Western Section Highlights in Prostate Cancer brought to you by Pfizer as an example. So we're not only looking at doing this at our section meetings, we're looking at it doing it with other partners as well, and I won't say more about that because that's I think Jennifer's going to talk about that a little bit later. So yeah, so those are a couple of the really big highlights. Jennifer's gonna share some more with you and I will turn it over to her. Thank you, Patricia. And thank you, Jason, for the lovely introduction. So one thing that's really important to us, we have already been doing mission-based goals surrounding our AUA news platform, starting in 2021, we started with a celebrating diversity with the AUA focus issue. That started with 20 invited articles from across the globe on issues of relevance to DEI and urology. That really started as a foundation for the future of our DEI content within the AUA news platform. We did the focus issue again in 2022, that content doubled. Then in 2023, this year, we tripled that content and we also had an open call for articles. The reason that we do invite content at this time is our staff that handles AUA news and all of our other publications, there's only a team of eight of us. So it's kind of hard to open up for open submissions, but we did it in this case and it sure was worth the effort in that case. The other thing is that we've seen in my time, as Patricia said, the IR&D team was gracious enough to let me come into those industry day meetings. And what we learned there is that our industry partners are very interested in accelerating their own DEI efforts. And we see this as a really future potential partnership opportunity to get some sponsorship from those partners and still support something that we were going to do anyway. So those conversations are ongoing and we're very hopeful that they will pay off in the future. We can also use our AUA newsworthy webinar and our AUA news inside tracked podcast to amplify that content distribution. Another important mission based goal of the AUA is our patient perspectives program. We do partner on this program with Pfizer. We are being sponsored by Pfizer for the third year. Our first year, this started as just a very small 12 patient presentation at our annual meeting. But what it's grown to be is this meaningful, organic and fluid relationship that we've built with a number of patients and the organizations they work with and their physicians over time. And what we have found is that Pfizer is equally as passionate about this as we are. And when we meet with them on the phone, it's almost hard to get off. We have so many ideas, things have just really spiraled in the best positive way. We use the AUA news platform unexpectedly. It was just meant to be at first presentations at our annual meeting, abstract presentations. But we use AUA news to publish those patient stories. And now what we do is throughout the year, we keep up with those patients. They're coming to us with ideas for other patients to publish in our publication. Social media, a lot of those patients, we heard a great presentation earlier from the AGA. And we have some great patients, just like I know all of your organizations do, who help to promote these patient voices within AUA news. It's also a great, and speaking of silo busting, it's a great partnership across many different functions of the AUA within our own division, but then throughout the AUA at large with the teams that are listed here. Another thing, another mission-based goal is engaging audiences. So I listen, I wrote this down from Jason. I always like to have a note pad to write down something interesting in case I catch something before I get up to give a presentation. Listening, diagnosing, prescribing, that's all super important to all we do, right? It's like what we're here to do. Curation, dissemination, keeping the research alive, engaging audiences in a way that is just beyond someone picking up what used to be the traditional journal. So one of our big goals within our publications program is to engage these audiences. One thing that we will be starting to do in January of 2024 is to have patient summaries of every research article from the Journal of Urology published on our AUA news platform. We also publish all insights, which are basically author-written, it's exactly what it sounds like, insights into a research article. What does the research mean? What were the limitations of the study? And we publish all of those ahead of our paywall on our AUA news platform. We'll also be debuting a read aloud JU insight podcast opportunity and looking into getting a patient editor for AUA news in 24. So it's just a unique way for us to use our platform to grow the diversity of the people who are engaging with our content, patients, physicians from outside of the specialty, et cetera. We haven't monetized these offerings yet, but again, we're in serious conversations with many of our partners about these opportunities. Okay, phew. I saw some clicker drama earlier today, so that was phew. So what's next? We have a lot of things on the horizon that we're thinking about. Patricia alluded to this earlier, the conference insider concept. Clinical takeaways from KOLs at meetings that are not AUA meetings. So that would be our sections, that would be SUO, ASCO, GERS, our European counterparts, and bringing home key clinical takeaways from those. We do have a lot of interest in our industry partners. Not everyone can be at every meeting, and that content is engaging in something that they're looking to sponsor. And how will we actually execute that? Well, we've been working on that. We have been piloting getting early career guest editors who are members of our organization. And we've already done this with the GERS meeting top left. And it was tremendously successful. We had a crew of residents who went out and essentially reported on the scene, came back with tons of video content, and we were able to populate that on our platform. Next year, we have a much more strategic plan in mind, though, with a full editorial calendar. We have online content editors who serve all of our publications, and they're going to help us to recruit this reporter talent, if you will, for these opportunities next year. And another thing, what's next? Again, Patricia alluded to this, resource centers. And what's really unique is we can use our AUANews platform to use multimedia content, journal content, and pull things out from behind our paywall from our subscription journals that make sense and in a way that industry is looking to sponsor. Industry then also can place their own content onto these resource center pages, whether that's a slide deck or an informational video, et cetera. So what's worked well? We're willing to try new things. We have excellent support from Patricia, from Mike Shepard, our CEO, from our industry sponsors, and from within the division, everyone's really excited and eager about this new opportunity. And what's really cool, too, is our industry partners are saying to us, hey, we didn't hear you say this or that, but would you be willing to try? And nine times out of 10, we'll say yes. There's a lot of innovative and creative team thinking and really reaching across the aisle and holding hands and partnering up on this. We do also have the fortunate privilege to have really strong internal teams, so marketing, communications, as two examples of the tremendous support we get from within the organization. What are our challenges? Well, competition is one. One of our biggest competitors of our digital ecosystem is a for-profit organization, and they have a lot more resources and deeper pockets than we do. But what we have is our content that spans back over 100 years. We have our physicians who are eager to help their member society, and we have the enthusiasm of our team. Also, keeping up with the growth. Again, we only have so many staff members, so we have to be mindful of what's working and what's not and really keep an eye on that. But what we always are keeping in mind is the urgent need to think about what's going on outside of us, outside of the AUA and in the publishing world and within the society and association landscape. And here's another key too. Find trusted partners. If there's one big takeaway I can tell you today is find teams who will work with you and work with you on the vision. Colleagues from Cadmore Media are here today. They have been a tremendous asset in our video content. We do host all of our video content on the Cadmore Media platform, but it appears as if the user, anybody who interacts with any of our video content or any of our webinar opportunities, they stay on our AUA news page. So we're not losing anybody to YouTube, Zoom, anything else. We are retaining any user on our page. And that team has been really critical in saying, you know, we've seen other clients try this. Why don't you guys try this? Meeting with us every week and helping us to try new ideas. We also work with Cactus Communications and they've been a tremendous resource. They are actually well connected with industry as well. So they've been willing to work with us on opportunities where we don't pay them directly, but they will come up with concepts and ideas that then we can present to our industry partners. We are not committed to pay for those services, but if that partner chooses to work with us, then we can contract Cactus at that time. So what are our top tips and tricks? I hate going to meetings where the ideas are so big, you're like, oh my gosh, what am I supposed to do with this when I get home? So just to drill it down, if something's not working, that's the thing that stands out to me the most, just stop doing it. Don't do it. Communication, communication, communication. I probably over communicate. Patricia's the same and that works really well for us. We tell each other everything, including if there's growing pains, there's too much work, it's getting too crazy, then we are very honest with each other. We trust each other, we believe in each other. And then here's my biggest thing, fake it until you make it. So when we're talking to industry partners, if it sounds like something that's possible, we'll say, we will explore that. And then we really do. So we always deliver on what we say we're going to do, but also I have to tell you, we don't always necessarily have a precedent for it, but it works. So I encourage you all to try and thank you so much for your time. Thank you. So we're now moving to the Not related to publications, we talked a lot about publications, but in another area, this is something we're launching, it'll be launched in 2024, we're in active sales right now, and really happy to say sales are going even better than we hoped, so that's always a good sign. So again, talking to our industry partners, which we do a lot, we really spend a lot of time listening, talking, engaging, brainstorming, and one of the things that we heard from them is, you know, clinical trials are a challenge for us, recruiting people, keeping people in the trials, the diversity element of trials, this is a real challenge for us, and we can't speak to our other industry partners, because there's a whole collusion thing, there's things you can and can't do, but we can talk to you, and how can you help us with some of these challenges that we have? So we put our heads together, and we came up with the AUA Clinical Trial Collective, so what we're doing here is we're bringing together leading urologists in the clinical trial space, so we'll have a collective, it'll have 12 clinical trial expert physicians that are leading the collective. Industry can participate through a membership, so they pay, and they get two seats on that collective. The focus area of this collective is really, what are the challenges that we're facing collectively as a group, both physicians, industry, so on and so forth, so what are the resource constraints? Clinical trial navigators, physician awareness, how do we get underrepresented patients and keep them in our trials? So our first year will be next year. We envision having three meetings, we're going to have two in person, we'll kick it off at our annual meeting, which is in May in San Antonio, over Cinco de Mayo, it's going to be tons of fun. We're going to have a virtual meeting in the summer, and then we're going to have another meeting in the fall at our headquarters in Maryland. We're really planning on spending this first year doing a deep dive needs assessment. What that looks like is we're going to do one-on-one interviews with physicians, with industry partners, with all of the key stakeholders in this space, get an understanding of what their needs are, what their challenges are, just to make sure we're addressing the common questions. So we'll do some focus groups, we'll do surveys, collectively, again, this is a collective, so it'll be industry partners working with the leading clinicians in this field in our space. And then our goal is by the end of that year, at that third meeting, we will have a strategy for year two and three. What do we want to develop, what are we going to be focusing on, and what is the actual work that's going to come out of this group moving forward? So that's a quick snapshot of one of the other new initiatives we have right now. We don't have any contracts signed, but we have about $200,000 in contracts that industry partners have asked for, so we're just waiting for them to sign them and bring it in. So we think this is going to be a very, very powerful program. Next is Eric. All right, so, here we go. When Jason reached out, I was thinking more about what we do in our exhibit hall, it's pretty complicated these days. I have great people who run this stuff. So we just had our annual meeting October 18 through 21 in L.A. We had 306 exhibiting companies and over 2,000 reps there. And if you go online to spine.org, you can find all this information. I'm going to talk a bit about the diversity of our activities within our exhibits. So this is our exhibit floor. The light green areas, those are business suites. I mean, everybody's probably got simple exhibits. You've got all kinds of different things going on in our exhibit hall these days. So I just wanted to describe that all to you to see if you guys might be interested. We got a lot of these ideas from groups like the American College of Emergency Physicians. I was at the AUA meeting last year, and I'm going to borrow their innovation nexus concept for our group. So this is really a great opportunity to learn. So not only do we have booths, but we have people who rent business suites because they might have a prospect at the booth. They want to take them somewhere and lock down a deal, talk about something else. We have an innovation lab, the lab campus. If you look in the yellow, we've got sessions that are innovation labs that go there. And then the surgical stadium is right in the middle. If you see the two aisles leading to a thing at the end, that's called our surgical stadium. We started that last year, and it's wildly popular. So I'll get into that in a bit, too. So again, the surgical innovation lab, companies can host their own cadaveric product demonstration. Costs about $12,000. We've got two-hour sessions, and those are sold out every year. There's usually a waiting list for those. We've got the business suites, like I mentioned, so they can conduct business on the floor. We charge seven grand for the days where they're there, and they're about 10 by 15 units. We have a red theater where you can also rent that, and it's like a solution showcase. So if you've got a new idea or a new product that's maybe a new take on an old product or a new use for it, this is where a KOL will come in. The company really can't talk about the off-label use, but the doctor sure can. Surgical stadiums. So this is what most people want to hear about. So we created this space for surgical demonstrations. We have cadaver labs right on the floor in the center of the hall. So in 2022, this was Chicago. It was in the center, and we had four sets of bleachers around them. So about 300 people could go to it. We had six sessions available, and we sold them out pretty much right away. We doubled it for 2023. We had 12 sessions. It was very expensive to do it this way, because we had to have duplicative AV, because if something went out during the session, you couldn't, you know, okay, stop your surgery and let us fix the AV. So we had to have redundancy for all that stuff. So we figured out a smarter way to do it in L.A. that cost about half as much. It's more of an auditorium style. So this was extremely popular, $25,000 per group. So if you got 12 groups, that's 300 grand right there. So we started off with the idea of doing kind of a battle of the surgeons, where we were thinking about getting two surgeons side by side, each doing a procedure with a different company product. But the companies didn't want to have that direct competition. So they were much more pleased with having Dr. Famous, as we like to say, demonstrating their product. This year we did have really one crazy thing. There was a bird that flew into our exhibit hall and landed underneath the cadaver bed. So we had a naming contest for that bird later on. Anyway, so crazy things. So again, it's the center of the hall. One of the crazy things that happened is after the pandemic, and I don't know if you guys have run into this too, but the companies don't have the same staff that they had before. It's a big problem. I was having lunch with a friend of mine, Kerry Hagan. He's the CEO of a company called Intrinsic. This was about two months before the annual meeting last year. And we catch up. He's helping me with a book that I'm writing. And then I asked him if he was going to be part of the surgical stadium. He was like, what's that? I was like, what do you mean? You don't know about it? So I explained it to him. And I said, we've been marketing this for a year. We send out the emails, blah, blah. He's like, well, the problem is there's nobody on the end of those emails anymore. So we took a left turn and we started marketing through LinkedIn. Because what happens, probably in all your fields, you've got Joe Smith. Today he's at Medtronic. Tomorrow he's at Stryker. So the email address doesn't work anymore. So we found that going through LinkedIn was a much better way to get a hold of everybody. So surgical stadium, I can definitely give you more insights into that. We also do the regular sponsorships, opportunities, banner ads, and stuff like that. We use a site called Big Commerce for that one. And you've got all kinds of branding opportunities, product types, escalator decals, you name it. If it's really a big meeting like we had in Austin a few years ago, we even had bus wraps outside. So that's it. All right. I have the privilege of representing in the emergency physicians, 38,000 members strong and growing always, right? We're always growing. And 8,000 attendees at our annual meeting every year. We just finished that up in October. And I'm here to talk a little bit about a partnership that we started conversations with in late 2022. We started conversations with a group called the Consumer Technology Association. For those of you who aren't aware of who they are, they represent one of the largest conferences out there, which is the Consumer Electronics Show. It happens every year in Vegas, because Vegas is one of the only places that can hold them. About 120,000 attendees this year. And so it's really quite a big event. I think that for those of you that may have heard of that, one of the things that you usually hear coming out of this event, our focus is on what is kind of Elon Musk's latest invention or what's happening on the latest burgeoning of entertainment and kind of areas that Sony or Amazon might be putting out. Well, because of that, the news media attention to this event is pretty large. So just even this year, 221,000 news stories went out from what was happening at this event. So it really was a neat partnership to look into. Well, I can tell you ASAP has not cracked creating our own self-driving car yet, but we definitely found a home in partnership with Consumer Electronics Show in their digital health area of their conference. So in that area, they do attract about 14,000 healthcare providers and professionals that attend the event. They also are represented in about 57 countries, and it's 33 of the top Fortune 500 companies in the healthcare sector are at this event. So quite a large showcase, as you can imagine. And I think it goes to say that the healthcare companies that are there are really focusing on telehealth, they're focusing on wearable technology and kind of how that connection of healthcare can happen in the home space. So a little bit about what we did in the partnership. We worked out a revenue share agreement with Consumer Electronics Show. We decided to co-brand a space within their digital health pavilion, an area that's really growing for them. And within that, kind of the epicenter in the middle of that was a digital health studio that we put together. And the health studio is really focused on capturing fireside chat content from these key healthcare leaders who are in this critical care and urgent care space that we also touch as emergency physicians. And so it was a great opportunity to highlight and put forward these companies that are coming up with great new healthcare innovations, but then it also gave us a stage for ASAP to be there and be a part of the conversation at such a higher level. So it gave us a chance to be on stage in that area and really talk about the innovations we have in the data institute and kind of our registry and the work that we're doing and how emergency medicine data can really be a founding footing of how we innovate in healthcare. Throughout that space and around that area, that content was captured, it was pushed out to the audience, and then around that area were many of these healthcare companies, and it gave them an opportunity to kind of own a kiosk around it. So this was something that CES didn't have additional kind of people power to put to it, but we didn't either. So when I looked at this, I said, this is a great opportunity for us to be a part of, but the truth of the matter is we didn't have staff to do it. So we went ahead and we got someone to come in and outsource the work. So we found somebody who knew how to do logistics, sales, and could run the meeting, or kind of the space that we'd created. And so, you know, I think it was a great opportunity to say, how do we kind of build this proforma? How do we make this work for us that we have an outsourced partner, but we're not necessarily taxing our own staff? So we built that into the model, and I think that the partnership for us, it was definitely produced more than one win. So it wasn't just about revenue generation for today. It was about this opportunity to be thought leaders, but then it was also this opportunity to think about, what is our longer runway to revenue diversification? Well, that's having a stage like this. It's having a stage where you can go and you can start a media conversation with some of the bigger healthcare companies that are there, thinking about kind of just conversations we've had with Amazon, some of the bigger players, it was really a remarkable place to be to start to build those connections. And I would say that the kind of the one of the biggest keys to success, when we started this partnership, we had about four months till the show. So it was a really short runway to make it happen. And so we really had to get permission from our board, from our leadership to say, hey, we may not do really well, we may, this may be a bust, but to be in an environment that allowed us and was encouraged us to kind of take that opportunity to fail is really a big part of what made it something that we had the opportunity to succeed in. So what's next? Obviously, we're iterating, this has been a great experience. I think if we look at it, and if we took it just on revenue that came out of it, for this year, we wouldn't necessarily say that was a huge win. It was a marginal win. We made money, but it wasn't something that that was the primary focus of the event. So I think the great opportunity is we're looking at how do we iterate this for the future and kind of create something that is a connection between our annual event and this event at the Consumer Electronics Show. And so what that will look like is how do we kind of connect the different supporters that we have for both of these areas, so that they're supporting both events? How do we make sure that we're featuring our EM innovators that are kind of coming through the pipeline of emergency medicine, who are there presenting at our hackathon? How do we bring them forward and kind of give them a stage at the Consumer Electronics Show? And that becomes a win for the membership, as well. Perfect. Thank you, Jen. So thank you all very much. I didn't think we would be in a position to where we're running a little bit early, but we are. So we have more time for questions. I have a few that I would like to ask. But before I do that, does anybody in the group have questions you want to lead with? Yes? So I have a question about the NAS surgical studio. Is there a product here where the company is saying they want to buy the space and they bring in the physician and design the curriculum? Or are you all doing that and it's sponsored? All we do is supply the space. They do everything else. We don't. We help them with the logistics. But it's two hours. Right. Yeah. They know who they need. The patients and all that. It's not CME. Right. No, no. It wasn't CME. I mean, I'm in CME. I know that's not CME. Yep. But if it was, my ears are closed and I don't know. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But I was just curious. Because we do product theater and it seems similar and I was curious. But it was really, really cool. The difference here, though, is that it's a stadium approach. So they can look around and they've got 300 people. Yeah. And they've got all those eyeballs on their product. Yeah. So they love that. Yeah. No, it's great. Thank you. So, Eric, to that. What struggles has NASS seen with the surgical stadium? I mean, everybody that does what we do in revenue development saw this and were like, I want one. You know? And you talked about the bird and you talked about the cost in year one. But outside of those, what are some real struggles that you've seen in getting this new concept launched? Number one, spreading the word. So we were crystal clear in our communications. But again, there was nobody on the end of a lot of those emails. So we started making phone calls. That was really tricky. Once they understood the concept, they were all in, then we had kind of a waiting list. But then technically, it's challenging. Because you have a limited amount of time between sessions. And we have a system where, like, we have a bio skills lab in my office. So if we're going to rent a cadaver, you know, you can't start with a scoliosis surgery. You've got to do injections first. Then you can do minimally invasive. Then you can do whatever. So we had to plan it all out so that we made best use of the cadaver. And also the time for prep. Because they're going to have different needs. They might have C arms. They might have fluoroscopy or some injection that they have to do. So there's a lot of logistics in between. So making sure there was enough time in between. And you also got to keep it cool in there. I mean, it's, you know, we're used to, in ORs, we're used to very cool environments. So we had to even cool down the exhibit hall even more than usual. The first year we broke even because the the costs were I think we we generate about $150,000 but it cost about $150,000 to put it on so it was a wash. You're right about the the limits. I think San Antonio has limits against they prohibit this so we're gonna try to find another way to do it or we might just skip it that year but Chicago is okay. LA was okay. We also kind of have a little bit of a you know ask for forgiveness not permission. You know if if the fire marshal tries to shut us down that's one thing but they're more interested in the exit signs so we have looked into that and so I do think it's it's in in Texas there's there might be an issue. So we might ask for an appeal or ask for an exception to the rule. Yeah go ahead. For any of any of you so what's your board in involvement in in all of these efforts? We we just did some board restructuring. We have a board member now who's going to be responsible for industry relations. We used to have ethics ethicists on our board so we're the pendulum is swung back. We still have an ethicist but do you have board members who are dedicated to helping with these projects? Yeah I would say that we didn't have any that were dedicated to the project so to speak until we were had decided to do it and then it was we you know because it was kind of one of those things when we looked at the profit and loss of the whole concept we were just under that threshold where our CEO could make the decision to say this is the financial risk we're gonna take and move forward. So we kept them informed. I think when we made the decision to move forward the board then did come in from a perspective of leadership. So when I talked about the media that was there to have your president at that stage talking to that many people was a remarkable opportunity. So I think there was just a lot of news media so that was there was kind of an after effect of a way that they were involved. Now I think because of that engagement there is more awareness of it and kind of looking at how we build this for a future and therefore we're talking more about how they're a part of that build out and helping us think through that from a concept concept space as well. So I'll say from the AUA side we don't have a board member that's dedicated to the industry relations and moving that forward. They are across the board very supportive. So for example I talked about an industry committee meeting we have our executive committee of the board and potentially some other board members depending on sort of what our specific goals are that attend and they're very very supportive. Depending on the level of the initiative we do have things that go in front of the board for general board approval but it's sort of approval and then we take it from there. So for example Innovation Nexus which was a pretty significant initiative for us we didn't really delve into that here but that's something we launched last year that went in front of the board for board approval but they don't manage they're not in it from a day to day basis but our board is very very supportive. And then from my end for askers our board is involved as we launch new initiatives. So last year when we were launching the multi-year engagement of our top year-round sponsors I worked with a few members of the board to actually build that so it would be more palatable to our board when we sold it internally. But as a day to day our president-elect works closely with me and in their president-elect year regular updates and if there's anything out of the norm that we want to launch that's new such as the premier sponsors platform then we'll run it through them but the day-to-day stuff like exhibit sales or putting something new on the exhibit floor probably not so much. So for your exhibit surgical space are you running that unopposed to your education sessions or are you having these activities at the same time your educational sessions are going and how do the sponsors feel about that? Yep so yeah so when we originally designed it we had six hours that were unopposed so the way we package it now is it's two hours one hour is unopposed the other you know there's concurrence going on and you know the the CME people don't like it but you know the the exhibit halls open all day long anyway so it's our we've got you know multiple goals we're trying to achieve and one of them is traffic in the exhibit hall and so this draws people in because they hear it they see it they're like what is that it looks like a basketball games going on and so it gets kind of fun people cheer you know it's it's it's really a highlight so. Jody can I ask how the how I assume it was the company you partnered with but how did they identify which consumer products would be featured how do they tie them to emergency medicine and then was there an approval process that someone had to go through on your end to be comfortable with that? Yeah so we were really in charge of who was in that space so they kind of leaned into us as content experts in our lane to say does this company belong here you know and I think that that also allowed us to kind of have some say of you know maybe you know we didn't we weren't vetting that any of these were past you know FDA clearance or kind of having that level of conversation it simply was to focus on what are the innovations happening and that we welcomed companies into that space but as far as being on the stage we did have control to say is this an ASAP company conversation leadership fireside chat or is it a company company rep conversation on that stage and so I think it kind of helped us minimize any concern there as far as putting anything out there that would be I mean a lot of the companies that are there are pretty down far down their pipeline as far as to market by the time they're there so we didn't really have any concerns in that regard but I will say that it definitely put us in the driver's seat as far as the content that was focused in that area and kind of how we drove which companies were there. Could you say just a word more about hackathon and how it operates and how you might tie it in that seems pretty fascinating. Yeah so we have a hackathon this is now our second year that we've held it at our conference it's happening on our trade show floor got to drive traffic and so we've partnered with a lot of like-minded young institutions Stanford EM for example is one of our partners and we're looking at kind of these opportunities to say what do we need to solve that's coming next so like for example one of the tracks of the areas that groups were forming to hack was health care at home so thinking about this equation of what health care at home will look like and what does that mean for the emergency physicians role in it so that they're kind of spending time leading up to the conference in small groups they're talking through their solutions as a group they're presenting at our conference and then we're awarding winners who will then go on to be able to share next year they kind of get awarded booth space to have the conversation some of them are hacking to specific solutions related to products and some of them are hacking in a track that's more specific to workflow innovation and so we have a couple different tracks of how we do that then that content becomes featured content we've we've gone ahead and offset that whole cost of that area in our exhibit hall through sponsorships so that's allowed us to do it there and so the whole the whole idea is how do we then connect those two and then the third part for those of you that know ASAP is to bring in this concept of you know we brought in the InnovateED which was the emergency department of the future and that's something we used to host on our exhibit hall we're bringing that back in a new format and a new model that will be featured at CES that will be kind of creating digital content of what the emergency department of the future will look like so it's a great opportunity to bring back that we've got our hackathon feeding into this as well so it's kind of allowing us to connect a couple of different activities and really give us a voice in innovation yes how much interest has there been among the membership I think physicians are so busy that they just don't have that extra bandwidth to take on being involved in a clinical trial and then secondly have you thought about using your registry to identify candidates for that and of course the big hesitation there is it's kind of like you know big brother looking at the data and then reaching out to the physician and saying hey you have some patients that would be really good for a clinical trial which we don't want to do but on the other hand I'm just curious as to what your strategies are more so regarding the clinical trial collective so we have 12 of our key leading urologists that are in the clinical trial space that'll be actively engaged in the clinical trial collective so it's a small number and they're really actually quite passionate about it because the challenges for them are as real as they are for industry partners so we're having a very very positive response on that to your second question the registry the answer is yes so we have a registry called the aqua registry we have a partner it's called Verona health and we do work with our industry partners our registry and our and Verona health in the clinical trial space you're right there's some sensitivities around the kind of information that you can share but we do have partnerships where we're helping identify you know unidentified data obviously but where there are opportunities for connection particularly in those very very narrow lanes where it's harder to get the patients so we've had a couple projects where we're helping identify trial sites and helping recruit trials where we know in an unidentified way that there are patients that meet the qualifications of those sites so keeping on the clinical trials collective bandwagon for a minute when you engage industry and you're talking with them are those relationships and those discussions multi-year agreements or are they single years that you're planning to renew year-over-year so that's a great question so we originally thought about having a three-year agreement but we didn't so we went with the year agreement so again this is our first year sure but right now we had a long discussion about that because we really did want to lock them in for three years but we also realized it was some still somewhat of a pilot program so right now there are annual agreements okay that we're hoping will renew and renew and renew yeah are the physicians remunerated in any way there's a small remuneration for them yes how about the patients so there are no patients as of yet on this clinical trial that may evolve it'll depend a lot on what comes from the needs assessment but right now it's really our our urologist and industry partners because I do think the registries would be you know a really great place and as you mentioned with the rarer diseases where some of these great you know immunological interventions are coming in and they really need to be proven but the rare disease is so hard to recruit and I do think what will be interesting and again we're still in the very early stages but as this clinical trial collective gets some legs you know and starts its work do they reach across the aisle and start engaging with our registry that may be one of the outcomes that that happens we'll we'll see because we'll let them drive sort of that decision-making process but there are lots of opportunities there for sure I think I think one of the ideas we have is to actually you know put a notice out saying hey if you participate in dataderm we have an opportunity to identify patients for clinical trials if you as a physician is interested then join this and I love your collective idea and then join the collective and then that would allow us to say to them in you know hey you do have some patients I should say that you know I highlighted one one thing we're doing because that was said that was sort of the ask but we have a lot of other initiatives in the clinical trial space as well particularly around awareness and branding and an outreach so we really are trying to experiment into a lot in that space to what you've just mentioned Eric I've got a question really for everybody we found this past year that DEI stuff like in particular we had a women in spine symposium than a luncheon industry was all over this and trying to support it and so we didn't know that they were going to be that interested in it they're also very interested in we have an early career advisory council anything to do with residents and fellows are you guys finding those kind of you know hooks to get folks in like we are I think COVID was a really great lesson in that especially in the emergency physician space of just you know to coalesce around a topic that touched everyone at the moment and had different ways that it was important and and there was money coming in for that so to have an outbound strategy was so important so we worked very quickly to say what is our what are all the things we need to support related to COVID care hey diversity health equity was a part of that but you know I think that now over the last few years when we look at a diversity health equity inclusion kind of lens of what is the work we need to be doing we have a very proactive plan so that we can tell the companies what it is we need and where we need to go because we know that there are now funds set aside for that at many many organizations there are other topics like sustainability that are becoming big topics so how do you kind of hook in and have your proactive plan so we're working on saying you know how do we make sure that a year a couple years out we're able to put that vision on their map because we know that there's gonna be funding for that yeah from our end that askers absolutely you know you hit on all the trigger points you know the the big differentiator with us though I'm gonna move away from DEI because that's that's almost a slam dunk for everybody society industry and industry is really wanting to engage with DEI but for us fellows it took believe it or not a couple of years for us to create and understand the definition that we as a surgical specialty society have for fellows those graduating you know residency training program into fellowship and what industry considered fellows those that were different so I think once we identified that then it's kind of opening up the space a little bit more for us can I just say I'm not going back to DEI for a moment sure like everybody else there's a lot of real strong interest in that everything from for example we had one program called advancing women in urology which was actually really focused on the urologists of women urologists and their specific needs and how you know we could work with them to make sure their needs are met I would say and this is just my opinion from the discussions and looking at how the money is flowing is that in urology initially there was a huge focus on diversity that's morphing into real a really strong focus on overall health equity so we're getting a lot of support in the health equity piece and how we make sure that we're really focused on that and addressing it holistically throughout the whole you know space of urology so I want to be conscious of time I think we're right up against it I do want to make a final observation and comment it was brought up a couple of times up here by Jennifer and Jody about exploring something new the board you know understanding that there might be a failure and you know I believe in the old adage of I told you I like quotes if you're not failing you're not trying and in my opinion the key to this is fail fast understand when it doesn't work and don't ride it into the ground and think it's gonna change tomorrow if it's failing identify it try something else so thank you all

collaboration

revenue diversification

medical associations

partnerships

innovative initiatives

listening to industry partners

opportunities for revenue generation

diversity

equity

inclusion