All right, welcome, everyone. We'll go ahead and get started right on time. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon. Hope everyone had a good break, got hydrated, caffeinated, all of the above. We are here for the first concurrent session, Shifting the Society Focus, Engaging and Retaining Gen Y and Z. My name is Ann Grupe, I'm the Senior Director of Continuing Education at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, and I am joined by a fantastic panel representing four different societies and four different PPGs, so I'll let them introduce themselves. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Vince Lofredo, and I am the Chief Learning Officer at ASA, representing the CPD PPG. I also like to mention that I'm honored to have my former boss and colleagues from the AAF piece, right up here in the front and back rows over here. I'm Mandy Davis-Akin, I'm the Vice President of Meetings at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, where I'm a colleague of Ann's. I'm Megan Bruner, I'm the Associate Executive Director for Marketing and Membership at AAPMNR, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. And I'm Jack King, I'm the Chief Information Officer at the American College of Surgeons. Thank you. Great. Thank you. So why are we doing this session? So the conversation a couple years ago, I know you all were part of it, we were too, pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic, right? The conversation is actually much, much bigger than that. We're in the middle of a huge generational shift, and our societies need to shift right along with that. If we're going to continue to be relevant to those physicians who we are serving. So we want to plan this agenda by looking at not only what we're seeing and what we're experimenting with, with our own societies, but what are you seeing? How are you experimenting? How are you managing this shift? So we are looking to have this be an incredibly active conversation. We want to engage and retain you as well. So this conversation is going to start with the panel, but it shouldn't just be with the panel. We really want to hear from each of you. Again, we've got the two floor mics. Please come up, ask questions, share ideas, challenge us, be provocative. That's how we're going to move this needle. When we get to that point in the session, I'm going to have a whiteboard, which is really just a Word document. But I want to try to capture those ideas and those themes that are coming from our panel, coming from you all, so that we can really kind of keep tabs on that conversation. And then we're working with CMSS staff to try to figure out how to keep this conversation going. This is not meant to be, you know, one hour, you know, it would be great if we could solve this all in one hour and then go celebrate with a glass of wine. But we know that that's not realistic. So how do we take advantage of this momentum that we hopefully start with this session so that we can continue the conversation, continue to share ideas, continue to share challenges and brainstorm together? So just to provide some context of who are we talking about, Gen Y or millennials and Gen Z, there are a lot of different definitions depending on where you look at. The graph I pulled says, you know, born anywhere from 1980 to 2009. So it's a wide swath. We actually have in our societies right now a fairly healthy percentage of physicians and other healthcare professionals who are millennials. So they're already here in our ranks. And if you think about Gen Z, they're the ones that are in medical school, potentially in residency. So they are coming up quickly. And as I am sure Vince is going to make a comment about, they have been educated very differently than what your typical or historical medical school training was for older generations like boomers and Gen X. So again, let's provide some context. Let's provide some framing. So big thanks to Mandy who got these slides from Freeman AV who we work with for our meetings. Some of the big pieces with millennials is experience, experience, experience. So if you're thinking about attracting, engaging, retaining millennials, what kind of experience are you going to provide for them? That's what's going to engage and retain them. And you look at all of these different kind of facts. You know, do you have fear of missing out? It's spending money on experiences over things. It's looking for that experience as opposed to even content. Then you look at Gen Z. Gen Z is a little bit different. Gen Z, in my mind, the one word that boils down to me is empowerment. They want to know how to contribute. They want to know how to have a voice. They want to know how to grow. They really see themselves as, you know, kind of differently from millennials in my view where an experience is what you give to me. Gen Z is what I give to you. And so they want to have a platform in order to give back. So it's a very different group of individuals, a very different potential kind of approach. So the other thing I will say, though, and I speak as a Gen Xer who often gets missed in discussions of generations anyway, but we recognize that there are different generations in our workplace and in our medical spaces. And within generations, there are also differences. So I think the key here also as we're thinking about this is it's never going to be a one-size-fits-all either across the board or even per generation. One millennial is one millennial. One person who's Gen Z is one person who's Gen Z. So it's really thinking about how can we provide a diversity of experience and value for our members as we look at this shift. So working with this panel has been so much fun. We've had planning calls that have run over both times because we've gotten so caught up in conversations. So what I've tried to do is distill those fantastic conversations to help prime us as a group with some starting thoughts and then some ideas to consider. So this is meant to really prime you, prime the panel as well to kind of remember what we talked about, but be thinking as I talk, as they talk, how do you want to contribute to this conversation? What kinds of things does this bring up for you in terms of your experience within your own society, within your own organizations, et cetera? So some starting thoughts. One is this disconnect between training and professional experience. So again, if you have been in a medical school or a fellowship that was all about the flipped classroom, was all about experience, hands-on, small group, competency focused, and then you arrive at a professional experience with an annual meeting that is lecture based and assessments that are knowledge based, and all of a sudden it is not at all what you experienced in training, that creates a disconnect, that creates, probably you're not really happy with that experience. And so how do we create alignment with that? I already went through kind of different expectations across the generations, but that's not just about Gen Y and Gen Z, right? We also have to be cognizant of the expectations of our Boomer and Gen X members, because we're still here too. The other piece is the pace of change. I'm sure you're all feeling it. We're absolutely feeling it within ASCO. Every year feels like a new year with new pressures, new changes, certainly new budgets. And just knowing that this year's plan isn't going to work for next year, the pace of technology changes are huge, dynamics are huge, there's a lot of variables that seem to be moving and changing much faster than we account for. And then money pressures, and this is not only budgets that are tighter for the individuals who are members of our societies, but it's society revenue pressures too, right? Our costs are continuing to rise. Then some ideas to consider. So a key concept here that came out of our discussions was how do we create experiences where people are experiencing together? Because that's the whole notion of a society, right? Is that we're better together, we can do more together, we can move the needle together. So how do we create that across generations? How do we leverage our technology? And who's our competition? You know, when we think about how expectations are set around technology, it's not from other medical schools or other societies or other medical organizations. It's TikTok, it's YouTube, it's social media. That's our competitors. Having multiple points of entry and also kind of how do we help people work across generations? How do we help members connect with each other across generations? What value can our older members provide to younger members and vice versa? What value can our younger members bring into our societies, potentially within leadership? And then how do we think holistically? And this is exactly why we wanted a panel that represented four different areas within the societies, because we can't just think about this as an education issue or a technology issue or a meetings issue or a membership issue. It affects all areas of our societies. And so we need to think about not only the problems together, but think about the solutions together. And with that, I'm going to tee it off to you all. So I think I got nominated to kick this off, and one of the reasons I think it makes sense for the meetings person to start this conversation is I think as a lot of you do, meetings are the initial hook into the society, right? It's a lot more likely that someone's going to attend your meeting and then see the value in becoming a member. And so when we started looking at how do we attract these new generations to the meeting, what are they looking for? We talked a lot about the experience piece of it, that what people were looking for was an experience that they could build. But also what we were hearing after COVID was why people came to our meeting wasn't just for the content, it was because their people were there. And so my question was for these new generations who hadn't been to our meeting before, how did I give them a chance to meet their people? Because that's how we were going to get them coming back every year, was we were going to help them build a community at our meeting that was something they came back to year after year after year. And as such, if they were coming to our meeting every year, then there was a benefit for them to join. There was a benefit for them to use other products. And so what we had always had at ESCO, which I'm sure many of you do, is a trainee and junior faculty lounge. And what we did was we took that to the nth degree. I like to call it the United Club of ESCO. We took empty space in our registration hall and we built a huge lounge that included space for mentoring and speed mentoring, that included a stage with programming specifically for fellows, but also that created, you know, spaces where you could charge up and sit and have a conversation, meet people from other fellowship programs, and had a home base that in a meeting of ESCO's size is a pretty overwhelming meeting. They had a place where they could go and take a minute, take a deep breath, and be around other people in their same age bracket, in their same experience, and hopefully meet other people. And then there are ways to monetize that. We put the career fair right next to it, right? Exactly who those exhibitors wanted to meet was those people trying to make decisions as they were early in their career. They did some things that they sponsored barista stations, exactly what the fellows and junior trainees wanted, and I had a way to pay for it. And so it gave us an opportunity to build this community. It was packed every day of the meeting, including Tuesday, which is our latest attendance. People talked about it. They shared pictures from it. They talked about how it made their experience at ESCO more welcoming. And my hope is that it's a community that as they move up in their career and the meeting gets more expensive, they keep coming back because now they've met their people. Let me add on just quickly. When you create an event or a bonding experience at a meeting, I always thought it was interesting. Data always fascinates me, right, from that standpoint being in IT. But you realize data isn't the phenomenon, it represents the phenomenon, right? And the experience that they walk away with and the feeling they have two weeks later, how do you rekindle that? We would roll out a meeting app and in other environments, same as this one, they're well used, they're well put together, but the sense of community that can be there in web form or in different opportunities that we have, it's there. But most of our younger members are here, right? So we can have content that's mobile friendly and renders well and create good experiences there. But really the question is how do we get to that single pane of glass, that last mile and stay connected with them so that we are expanding our relevance to this generation. I think many of them, they haven't, they've grown up in a digital world, they don't appreciate as much of the analog experience. So if you can intermingle these two experiences together, I think it goes a long way. But I think it starts with recognizing that the very folks that we're trying to attract and retain aren't living and hanging out on the website that much, they're on their phones all the time. Anybody have children that are in their 20s or even into their teens? You all know what I'm talking about. They don't read their emails consistently. If they want to have instant communication, they use apps to go back and forth and do that. And I think we have to think about how we can ingrain our organizations into that world because the way that we did things in the past won't appeal as much to this generation. My wife tells me all the time when I say, why is my son not answering my text? She says, you're not on Snapchat. That's such a great point. The thing is, is that we have to look, you know, what I try to talk to teams about is taking a look at what is happening in this generation as they move through med school and into residency. And the pandemic only accelerated what they do. We have groups that are now med schools that have created case-based, problem-based learning with tremendous virtual reality presence in Kansas City. The med school there has four floors for each year of medical school, 36 rooms, six to eight people to a room for case-based, problem-based learning. You walk right across the state line and go to the osteopathic school and they're handing out VR goggles to all their first-year students. The point is, is that the gap in learning styles is growing exponentially between those that are coming into the profession and those that are more senior in the profession. The worst AI you're ever going to use is the AI you use today. Because tomorrow it's going to be even better. And they are on it. They're on the phones. They know how to use it. We've had folks who come into our learning sessions and say, you know, if it's not on here, I'm not going to use it. This phone here has, you know, one terabyte of memory to it. It's the same as your computers, if not more. How do we leverage that? How do we leverage the technology and leverage the way that they have learned in med school and keep that into residency and keep that going throughout? And I think that's probably the biggest challenge for us because they don't share the same perspective of being, for example, as part of a medical specialty society. A lot of data shows that they just don't, you know, we were talking earlier, you know, they weren't part of the Sunshine Act. They haven't lived that experience. They're indifferent to what happens here now, even around pharma being involved with education. So how do we leverage that concept of how they learn and the way that they receive information, that communal piece that we were talking about earlier around the live meetings? How do we build off of that? How do we keep them connected as we go through? Is it digital connectiveness? And when we talk about leveraging those technologies, a big part of that is that digital connectiveness. We have to do something similar with an interworking of both the live meetings that we have and the digital presence that we serve with them. How do we introduce these concepts in a live meeting? How do we get them connected in a live meeting and then keep that going throughout the year? Having continuous engagement with the learner all the way through, because that's what they're used to. And I think that's a big part of it. Something that we're talking about, too, the channels that they're using that may be different. Key piece is that there's no one silver bullet. It's not TikTok's going to save us or, you know, whatever it might be. So what we talk about on our team a lot is any piece of content, gain it out in many different formats to appeal to different types of learners, different generations, but knowing is not, you know, we hear a lot, you just got to put it on Instagram because that's where they are. That's where some are, not all. So being just cognizant of there isn't one solution and how we're communicating or delivering our education and but finding one good concept that resonates and gain it out in multiple ways in different formats. One thing to add on, I believe that many of them are very excited about social causes, right? And really great, health equity, social determinants of health. There are hooks, if you will, that no matter which medium we want to meet them within, those are the things they're passionate about. Those are the things they're doing searches on. Those are the things that they're reading or consuming. And I think figuring out how to continue to tap into that excitement around those issues and make sure that it goes beyond that meeting also, I believe, makes them feel proud to be connected with organizations that are taking a stand, that are trying to make the world better, even though sometimes it can be a little controversial. Absolutely. Having those voices heard and being multimodal, I think is a big part of that. When we create education and information now, we need to make sure that we are multimodal because we are trying to reach just a broad spectrum of learners. It's just that that group is used to having escape rooms and Jeopardy or Family Feud as part of their med school programming, things that we didn't have in the past. And I think that lends itself to what both of you are talking about. And I think they expect, as we were talking about, the pace of change and responsiveness. They expect us to be responsive. They expect us to be talking to each other. If something is getting leverage on a certain modality, we should be trying new content on that same modality and seeing if it sticks. If social determinants of health are creating a bunch of attention on Instagram, I should be figuring out how to create a program on that at the meeting and playing it up to that same audience. They expect, their life is responsive. They're on their phone, they do something and it changes to meet their needs. They're expecting the same out of us and we're not quite structured to do it yet. It's a challenge. Another area we're hearing a lot of requests need or seeing traction is around those opportunities for growth. One way we've thought about it is recognition and visibility. How are we providing those opportunities for them to be visible within the organization, to be recognized for their early achievements and that opportunity for growth? And a challenge we've had is the word, words. We may have specific frameworks in our head when we say mentorship or leadership of what that work looks like and generationally and what they're looking for might be very different. So mentorship, we're finding really is access. How do they have access to leaders? Not how do they have a mentor that they're meeting once a month, but how do they have easy access to a leader they may not or later in their career they may not otherwise have access to. That's something as a society we can fill. That's a need we can fill. Leadership opportunities, they're not looking to chair a committee when they're first year out, but they are looking to have a voice and to have something that not only they can participate in and feel good about, but can also help their CV, their next career jump. So providing those opportunities early has been a big opportunity. There are some great ways to tie it into other needs. We were having challenges as we rotated some members off of our committees and off of places. They still wanted a place in the society. Funneling those people into, whether it's a mentoring role or something as simple as we're having a fellows reception. We'd love you guys to come down and introduce yourself. It works for both parties, right? It gives those people moving into the end stages of their career who don't have as clear of a place in leadership a role in building the future. And it was really exciting for the fellows for those people to have people who wanna come meet with them. So it kind of solved two problems for us. I think I wanna point out one more thing that we can help this generation with. They're digital natives, but the world is changing. I've been in IT for 30 years. It's changing faster every 90 days now than it took years to see the change. I heard on a podcast the other day that if we just stopped where we're at with AI right now, it would take over 10 years for most people to even comprehend and apply what's capable right now today. So if you just stop for a minute and think about what's going on in the world today, if you just stop for a minute and think about this generation, and they are still human and can only absorb so much as well, what role can we have in curating those new experiences and showing them how to apply that technology, how to use it ethically, how to connect to further the causes they care about? So I think it used to be about publishing. It's not about, we need to have responsible ways to do peer review and get things out the door faster and make sure things are solid, right, and viable. But the days of waiting for cycles and time over and over, especially with the generation that's used to instant gratification. I don't know how many of you use a lot of the apps on your phone. I'm sure if I look at my top usage, it's not just Amazon. I use the Walmart app pretty regularly. I can have food dropped at either one of the houses, right, when I'm gonna go or stay somewhere, right? Life has been made so easy for them, but now instead of Googling, which we all learn to Google and do things along those lines, think for a minute. I use ChatGPT more than I use Google now, right, and I ask it to cite sources. It's not only returning something, it's telling me how credible what it is has been returned. It's citing sources. Yes, it can still hallucinate, right, it's not perfect, but the world is moving very fast. Education is getting commoditized in many different ways. We really need to think about how do we help people and what is our role in that future? Absolutely, absolutely. It took AI three months to reach 100,000 users. It took cell phone use six years to reach 100,000 users, just in terms of the rapid increase in AI. We now can use, and they're gonna be, think about lectures coming up and presentations like this. Right now you can plop in the data you wanted to ChatGPT and actually create a podcast, a full one-hour podcast, which all you do is plug in a few keywords and a few key things that you wanted it to do, and it's pumping out a full podcast of two people talking to each other. And that was only released, what, a few weeks ago, I think. If there's gonna be a lot of noise, how do we help people get the signal, right? I mean, it's gonna be the classic case of picking out that signal, but it's gonna get more and more challenging with more and more noise, right? So that's the key. There's, when you think about your traditional applications as well, you'll continue to see, whether it's Apple or Microsoft and others, talk about the AI capabilities, and you think about edge computing. You know, you can take, induce, there's some augmented reality and virtual reality planning software that you can run on local devices. You know, you don't have to be connected to the cloud. You could literally bring it into an operating room. You could do other things. So the idea of even thinking about how we use technology and being contextually aware, who am I, where am I at, what do I need right now, and then suggesting it back to me because it's aware on my device. It knows if I share, if I choose to share with it, knows my location. It may know what I do in that particular location. And now, based on either predictive analytics or suggestive engines, right, in terms of recommendation engines, what else might I need? And by the way, if another resident found this to be really useful, the same way we would from an Amazon review or something else, how are we using that data to move things up or to make sure that it's getting out in front of the right audience? The days of publishing something and hoping someone comes to look at it are over. We need to be using that technology to apply it and push it to right where they are. Knowledge occurs in the middle, but life happens at the edge, right? So a smart edge is going to enable these things to happen. All the sensors that we see, whether it's the temperature in this room or different things, they're feeding back. There's insights that can be gained out of that data, but life doesn't change until you take those insights and put them into action back at the edge, right? And that's what we need to think about. I think, Jack, you're so spot on, because right now, one of the biggest challenges all of us in our medical specialist societies have is the need to evolve rapidly, to make these changes that you just talked about, because it is, if we're not growing the way we produce our programs, and again, it's a difficult situation, because you still have to make sure that you are meeting the needs of everybody in your membership, all your diplomates need to be able to, your members and learners need to be reached. In the format, that means most to them, but this group, being selective as they are, in order to reach them, we have to leverage that technology. And one thing I like to talk about is just go into your own personal experiences and think about how we're being trained in a way around how to consume entertainment, just digital entertainment, and whether we're streaming or doing anything like that, that instant access, that instant gratification. The same way with education, and that's the way it's moving, is how do we give people that instant information, instant feedback on how they performed and how they did? So it's not just the education, it's also the assessment. So we've gotta be working with our boards as well to make sure that the education and the assessment are evolving to meet those needs. It's a big part of it. So, yeah, if this is bringing up things for you, simply bringing things up for me. Come to the mics. I may ask a question. I'm Sabine von Price from Post-Acute and Long-Term Care Medical Association. Fascinating, I am, full disclosure, a baby boomer. What I am wondering, and I still like big lectures, kinda, I'm going to smaller-sized education in my own facilities, but what I'm wondering is how has all that insight translated in the way you transfer knowledge in your meetings? Are you still doing big lectures? Are you still, you know, what has changed for you other than, I love the idea of the junior lounge, but how have your meetings changed and the delivery of knowledge and the transfer of knowledge changed? So I can, one of the things that is nice about the trainee and junior faculty lounge is it does have its own session space, and that can become a sandbox for us to try new things. And so they have tried a variety of things using the app for eQ and A, take a lot of polling. We're adding in a lot of interactivity. The reality is, is ASCO has 45,000 people at it. We're never gonna get away from some big lectures. It is always going to be part of the way we work, right? And so the question is, is looking at how do we offer some different types of session formats in small pieces and seeing where they resonate with people, right? Where did we get the highest audience? You know, as funny as it sounds, some of the best things are the cheapest. This is a group that's really used to podcasts. They really like two people with no agenda sitting on a stage talking to each other, right? The lowest cost session you can do, right? No technology, no anything. But this is a group that craves authenticity, and it feels a lot more authentic to them when it's two leaders up there talking in a way that feels off the cuff without slides. So you can be creative. It doesn't all have to be new room sets and different things. It's really talking to the audiences and figuring it out and understanding that you're not gonna turn the entire wheel 360 degrees in one year, or probably even 10, or maybe at all, right? As much as Anne would like me to have a very interactive plenary session of 9,000 people, it's probably never gonna happen. But there are places where we can create moments of interactivity where we can play with some new ideas. We're working on an AI lab that's gonna happen at this year's annual meeting where people can walk around and experience on different softwares kind of what their answers are. That's session learning, not in the typical way, but a kind of learning lab that gives people another way to approach things. So it doesn't all have to be within our static framework. You don't need to feel like you need to throw the entire apple cart upside down. You can take it piece by piece and see what works, what actually attracts people, and then go from there. I'm sure you're all doing some things as well. We've been playing with the education on our show floor. I know Rebecca's in the audience here from APM&R, so there's lots that we've added to try with hands-on, small formats, career corner sessions. They're targeted at different people in different career stages. They're also to provide more of that hands-on opportunity. I know lots of groups are playing with these things, but we've seen a lot of success with that, to both driving traffic in our exhibit hall, and also providing some of that different learning style opportunities, in addition to the conversations and the different lecture styles that we can pull off. You know, I want to just echo the comments around variety, and that's the key, because you're never gonna get away from full lectures. That's always gonna be part of it, but you do need to try some different things. Some of the biggest things we're seeing are the small groups just getting people around a table and having a conversation, or fireside chats, another very big thing. We're incorporating, in the future, with a company called Training Arcade. It's gonna allow us to have gamification during our live meetings. What does that mean? It means every day you wake up, we're gonna have a wordle for ya. We're gonna have something that's going to, when you walk in, you'll be able to see a leaderboard of people for the different games that we'll have during the day. Something that's keeping people interactive, even while they're sitting in one of the lectures. Those types of things, I think, are really important. I like to point out something that one of our members in the audience, Margo Savoy, did a few years ago around having a VR session that she got a grant for. That VR session wrapped around the corner because people were trying to get in there and use it. And when you think about CME for your education, we always think about it as one classroom, one room in your sessions for an hour. What if your CME actually started at eight o'clock in the morning and ended at five o'clock at night? Meaning that we took that VR opportunity and we said, there's six sessions in that VR case. Come in, do one, two, one this hour, two this hour. Come back, do it again tomorrow, do it again later. If you do them in small, micro-learning bursts, different types of things, so they can constantly have interaction, it's going to have a profound impact for some folks. So we have to think a little differently than the way we've done it in the past. The one great thing about a packed lecture, if it's a great discussion, entertaining especially, you can get that FOMO feel, at least, which is really important for the audience, too. So that fear of missing out, did you hear, were you in that room, were you enjoying that session? And that great photo of that packed room can do a well, do a big service to communicating the value of the meeting, of being in the room, being at the meeting. Absolutely. Great, I wanted to follow up, Jerry Pencil with AMGA. I wanted to follow up a little bit more on meetings, and you've answered a lot of my questions, but even more, we've been surveying our younger audiences and they want, a couple things is what they're telling us. Number one, participatory. They really feel like they have expertise and they want to be contributors, so they don't want to be talked at, they actually want to sit around and solve it. So I just wondered if you'd comment on that. Yeah, so I think that's great, and some of the sessions in the Fellows Lounge or Trainee Lounge are actually planned by the trainees themselves, and so they are up there talking to people. There are also posters that we have set up in the Fellows Lounge, and so those are used in part where people can do smaller posters, learn how to talk at a poster the first time you've never been at a poster, can be a pretty overwhelming experience, and so being able to have some trials there. I know that there have been some conversations in the professional development team about them mentoring each other, not just mentoring at different levels, and I think that makes a lot of sense too. What someone's experiencing at Memorial Sloan Kettering is probably very different than what somebody's experiencing as a community practitioner in a rural area, and so they can share a lot. That was part of, you know, one of the things I told people I learned from COVID is that the hallway conversations were as important as the things people learned in the sessions, and I think that is some of what giving a space to the trainees and junior faculty became is people started meeting people and having conversations and teaching each other in real time. It wasn't necessarily a session, but it was a place where they could convene and have conversations. One of the things we are talking about is should we start broadcasting some sessions down there this year? Because then they can have more informal conversations and be watching it together as opposed to in the room, and so we're gonna play around with that a little this year and see how it works. Yeah, just one other thing we've been playing with emerging leaders. This is our third iteration of trying it. We tried social events. They kind of worked. They kind of didn't. We tried bringing them actually career coaches and doing sessions. That kind of worked, kind of didn't, so we're trying more a mentorship program, and just we're getting it off the ground, but one nice success is, and I think this plays into what you said, we asked our more seasoned leaders to be mentors. The response was overwhelming, and we're not paying them. They're volunteers. Boy, were they looking to give back. No, I think one is something that our senior leaders are looking for. They want to give back, and they want an opportunity to do it, and to be honest, those names bring people in for the mentoring sessions, and so being able to put something up that says all these people are participating, sign up, is a great thing, and for those of you, we do this more at some of our smaller symposia, but we do career choices sessions when we don't have as many mentors where there are small round table discussions, and so we put one mentor at a table of five or six or seven fellows, and that's a conversation. We've actually found for some people, both of different cultures and just people who are less outgoing, it's more comfortable to be in those group scenarios in some cases than one-on-one, but it's also a great alternative if you don't have a huge pool of mentors to pull from. And let me just add to that. We've done something very similar around those round tables where we've had our mentors there, and we really focused it also around not so much clinical topics, but practice and career topics. You know, how to build your practice, how to build your career, how to pay off debt, all the different things that, and it was almost like speed dating, so we'd introduce a topic, you know, let's have a chance to talk about it, then let's move some people around so you can talk to a different mentor, and let's introduce a different topic. So it was just a really, there's a lot of really good ways, especially if you pick the right topics where they really need to lean into a mentor that can help them build their career, and leadership is a big part of that, so. Hi, Mary Kratz, Interoperability Institute, a nonprofit that works in health IT innovation. My staff are all Gen X, Gen Y, as are my children. As I look at our list, I really thank the panel for your insights, but it's really focused around your society's conferences and activities, but as I look at getting through on the screen, multiple formats and channels, particularly adoption of new technologies, what I hear from my staff is they want persistence. They want that social media channel. So I know how exhausting it is to put together the content for an annual conference. Imagine fresh content on social media. So my question to you is, what are your societies doing about persistence of these channels for your memberships, particularly the Gen X, Gen Ys? We have an incredible integrated communications team, so between, you know, marketing tools and tactics, seeing who they can reach and laying out their programs, they're very effective at reaching the right people at the right time. There's a lot of work that goes into this, there's no doubt. The one thing that I keep coming back to is that last mile, that last pane of glass. You're right, if you look at how they're using those phones today and you see how they're hitting that social platform all the time, they're checking to see what their friends are doing, they're checking to see what their colleagues are doing, they want to learn about the latest thing, and we want to stay relevant, right? So understanding their behaviors, meeting them where they're at, and then leading them back to whether it's your own app or your own website or whatever property you're trying to bring them to is the key. I think there's a lot of tools out there and probably afterwards we can talk. I happen to have someone from our team here, Natalie, and I'm very fortunate, I have an incredible team, makes the technology part a lot easier, but there's a lot of tools and tactics that you can use, and I also believe that I've had some experiences in the retail side of the world as well, and when you look at getting in front of that customer and meeting where that customer is, there are a lot of tools where you can set the campaigns, you can watch behaviors, you can watch for keywords, and then you can automate a lot of these things, and then over time you collect data, right? It used to be, you know, how many click-throughs, how many emails did we open, how many did we do? When you look at where these folks are hanging out on these different platforms, you can start to reverse engineer and figure out this member, this person that I'm trying to reach spends a lot of time over here, I'm gonna go heavier weight over here, and then try it, right, and collect the data and see if it works, but the automation of many of those tools has made that lift a lot easier than it was years ago. A specific content strategy as well that's helped with our persistence on our channels ties to that recognition and visibility. So how can we feature more people and their stories that they want to have out there? So we added an honoree program separate from our formal awards to say we're some innovators and influencers earlier in their career, had that be a recognition along with a new initiative we had about free education in the month of May, and we featured a different innovator and influencer each day of the month to go along with that. So we're featuring the members, they're getting that visibility, and it's helping with that content flow, and then how do we continue to use that content throughout the year so it's not just a one-time thing, that persistence can be content you've created for different channels, but bringing it back in new lives, and that really can help. You don't have to create 365 different unique ideas to have 365 posts by any means, right? You can have one good idea and you can get a month of traction out of it by dripping it out in different ways and changing how you're the angle on it as well. It's also a good way, as he mentioned before, the younger members are looking for a way to participate. This is a great way. They can create the content for you. You know, we have featured voices at our meeting where we're picking out Twitter handles or blue sky handles, whatever, you know, speaking of the rapid pace of change. They're also creating a day in the life videos for our Instagram channel. Most of that work is coming from the volunteer themselves. We're helping them repackage it and we're giving them amplification on our channels, but all the content creation isn't coming from us. We're using those members and attendees to help us build our own content. Hi, good afternoon. Miguel Paniagua from the American College of Physicians. Vince, your story triggered something in me about your son. When my sons called me my first night in the Middle East at a conference and asking me at 3 a.m. for the Wi-Fi password. So I'd say this generation has no concept of time. Great panel. My question is related to if there's any opinions or experience on gamification of this content specifically. We've talked about some technologies, we talked about some methodologies, but an example being what James Willig at UAB has done with his Kaizen platform, if you've heard of that. It's an open access platform where you can create various ways of gamifying online asynchronously or real-time with some of this content across a variety of platforms. So I'd be interested in your thoughts. Thank you. Yeah, gamification I think is a big part of it, right? And I think that there are, you know, we've talked about, and again, one of the things that we're entering into our gamification strategy is that we give folks the ability to take those different games that we're going to leverage, and again, the organization that we've gone with is a company called Training Arcade, who happens to own the rights to Jeopardy and Family Feud and other different types of things. But they also have the ability for them to reach certain levels that will unlock the next level. And so that's a really big thing that we're trying to do is to get that engagement, that little bit of competition, and also that daily engagement. So what is it? And they call it noodle, but it's it's WURTLE. But how do we keep them, like, wanting to come back? The other point that you bring up is that's very important, is how do we actually, one of the things we've talked about is going to our residency programs and actually having a competition. Because some of them are already doing, you know, Jeopardy, right? So how do we sit there and say, we've talked about doing March Madness and actually getting the residency programs to actually, you know, get put into categories, and they are going to compete. And then we'll have the final four, and then we're gonna have a grand champion, and a cup that goes around, and you get to have bragging rights for the year, and it stays with you until the next final four, and it just moves around. So I think those are some of the unique things that we have to think about how to leverage that gamification, because to Jack's point, they've grown up on this. They've gamified everything. They've been using, you know, I have my old Nintendo system, and my son looks down and goes, what is that? I'm like, you, I used to play Mike Tyson when Mike Tyson was actually, you know, and he looks at me like, what is that? So it's, it's, you know, and while he's on this, while he's playing a game, a football game against his brother in Texas, I mean, it's just, they're used to having that distance, and there's ways for us to do that. Yeah. And I think we have to leverage that. That is a huge part of the future. There's a hybrid approach and angle that I've seen used in the past. It was called the Resident Rumble, and it basically started online, and to your point, during, in a bracketed way, and then it culminated in a big event that was sponsored by industry at the meeting. So you had all this build-up. We had social media and different things that were bringing attention to it, and that was a really interesting way to both connect them on the platforms online, bring them to an in-person event, celebrate them, and, you know, there was appetizers and drinks, etc. It was just a very fun, light event, but that brought quite a few of the younger folks out of their shell as well, right? So folks who, coming out of COVID, especially for those who were isolated for a long time, these events, I think, were really important in getting people to socialize again. Yeah. We talked about doing that with Family Feud, having it, having it go along throughout the year, and then bringing the two, the final two to our annual conference, and put them up on stage, and wouldn't that be a lot of fun, you know, for everybody to see that? That'd be, it's just a really good opportunity. And you can even do it, if you want to make it even a smaller environment, you could do it throughout the event, you know, if you have that Family Feud starting on day one, and the last day, you, or whatever game you want it to be. So Angela Babb, American Academy of Neurology, thank you for a great session. So a lot of our organizations, we're seeing a much greater share of our membership now being global. So my question to you is, what are you seeing globally with Gen Y, Gen Z? What should we be mindful of, and what we, what may we need to adjust here when we're accounting for engaging that global younger generation? So I can say at meetings, it's a much more diverse group. We are seeing a greater range of participation from all over the globe. It's kicking back off now, it was still a little slow in particular in terms of Asia, but last year, when I look at the participation and who was in the trainee lounge, it is a much wider representation of country, of institutions, and of, you know, gender. You know, the diversity is bigger, but they are, and as such, they have different needs, right? So we actually recently, we started, ASCA started doing a meeting in Asia. We realized that our U.S. brand of just come in and have a glass of wine and introduce yourselves to each other did not work. It was a total failure in Asia, because they are such a formal society that we needed to provide formal ways for people to meet each other, much more structured pieces of networking. And so those are some of the conversations now we're having about the trainee lounge, too. I have a bunch of people from different cultures in this lounge, how do I make sure that they feel comfortable? Is it just, you know, some of them may just walk up and talk to the person in their coffee line. Some of the people are waiting for an introduction or some kind of more formal piece. So what can we do on the first day that can help those people who need a little assistance in making those connections make those connections? So I think you have to be aware of that and look at the makeup of your audience and think of some different things. And I'm sure in terms of education, it differs as well, or tech. I mean, we talked about Asia. We went to Asia and I thought our tech was great, and I was like, these people are unimpressed with us. We gotta step it up again, right? Like, as a culture, they are miles ahead of us in some ways, and so you do have to think about that as you approach. Like, who is your audience and what is their level, and how are you gonna meet it? I will make a plug that the content and materials that we have in our own native tongue, when you look at the translation costs of moving things over, you can now do this for pennies on the dollar for what you did before. If anybody is interested in finding out more, you can see me afterwards. But things that we used to pay tens of thousands of dollars to set up and have others review, we're able to do in a matter of minutes and for less than $100, right? So there's a lot of ways now to, if you're trying to expand your membership or your brand, it's a lot easier to get into those markets with your materials because the barriers before used to be not only, where's my point of entry, but how do I make sure that I'm entering this in the right way and that these materials will resonate, they're easy to understand, they mean the same thing as we think they mean, right, when we translate things. So there's a lot better tools to do that today. AI is only gonna help, right, with that. The other part is that, as I mentioned earlier, the pandemic only accelerated the globalization of our reach, especially when you think about people who are searching for COVID information globally. They started finding it in places they never thought they would find it before and that brought us a whole new set of viewers and users that we have to start looking at how we're able to get the information out there. I was part of a symposium with the ACCME around the use of AI and there's discussions around how do we set standards for this education, this information that's going out, especially through the use of AI globally. So I think it's not just the United States that are thinking this way, there are other countries that are also trying to figure this out and we're all, I think, in a position trying to work on it together. The interesting thing will be what is our role in helping others understand misinformation and disinformation because this same technology will propagate it even faster, right. So I think that's really the other side of the coin on a lot of this is, you know, bad information can get out there and run around the world before the truth can even put its shoes on, right, from that standpoint. So what types of controls, what types of policies, how do we all become more of a voice of reason in what could be a very crowded and noisy market where there's a lot of... Anyone heard of the Adelman Trust Barometer? It's sort of an interesting tool. I see some people nodding their heads. You know, we live in an age where that trust in big institutions and other things, it continues to be a massive gap, right. So it creates a lot of opportunity for societies, colleges, associations to be that beacon of light. You know, we've been that beacon of light for a long time in an analog world. How do we shine that light for everybody in a digital world, right? What does that role look like and what is our responsibility to do that? That same technology can be used for evil purposes. We all know that. But I think that's where the governance, the ethics, the tough discussions with the board and other folks about what's our role in this as we evolve are really important. Playing that role, I think, Jack, is so important too because you bring up such a great point around the fact that there's so much noise out there. Your members and learners are already seeing you as a gold standard in whatever specialty society you're in. That's gonna get amplified if you're able to be that social media presence and other things out there so that you can get it to it. And again, that'll go globally as well. That's such a great point. Hi, I'm Brian McNabb from DocMatter. I'll start with a comment that people are free to disagree with, but regardless of generation, I think people are still coming to their society to get high-quality information. Correct. So as you think about repackaging it into ways that different generations are able to kind of interact with, how do you ensure that you're not kind of diluting the information in the process? Because sometimes you can get stuff that doesn't come out as high-quality as you intended as you try to repackage it in a new format. So I can give two examples. My personal favorite example is we have three-hour oral abstract sessions, which to me, I don't think I can do anything for three hours. But we have a series, so we, when we went virtual, packaged it up into individual presentations. The amount of calls we got that said, why can't I watch the full three hours, was shocking. So it is a reminder that all kinds of audiences are looking for different levels of information and to get it in different ways. And so, you know, part of it is giving people not just bite-sized information. The other thing is, we've been talking a lot with our website about, could we personalize a homepage for people? We know what your specialty is. Can we give you that information first? We got a lot of feedback that said, I don't want you filtering our information. I want to, I want to see it all and decide what's important to me. And so there is this really important balance between curated in a helpful way and not over curated, so people don't feel like they're not seeing other stuff that's important. And we're all gonna have to figure out what that balance is. And we don't want to give, you know, a misperceived view of what's going on because they're only seeing this column or this silo over here. So I think it is, it's an important question to wrestle with. I think it's important to understand that natural language processing and when we ask a question, you know, if I ask Siri a question or ask Alexa to reorder something or to send me paper towels, it's going to send me probably the highest margin ones that suit Mr. Bezos, right? So I think we really need to think about that. In a world where Google used to show me at least ten different results and maybe I could see some dissenting returns that were in there, we need to be very careful around the channels that are giving us a one-sentence answer or chat GPT making a recommendation, show me four other things that don't agree with this, right? So the prompt engineering, the ability to train, this generation is very trained. Y and Z, they'll ask that next question. They understand the syntax of data and the more that I understand as a prompt engineer, the better questions I can ask. The better I can ask a question, the more reliable those results will likely be. So it really is about learning those skill sets. They're primed for it. If anything, I think it'd be interesting to have them continue to step up and at these meetings train others on how to do it. We also see a two-way feedback loop. So if it is member-generated content, how are we as marketing reviewing that and making sure it's ideally we're providing as much information upfront about how to make sure this adheres to the content standards or the main core messages so that we're not asking to change things afterwards, right? So how much information can we give up front if it's going to be member-generated? Then on the other side, if it's AI-generated, how do we get member feedback to make sure that nothing's missing the mark and to make sure that we have that feedback loop as well? So we're developing both of those feedback loops to make sure that the core is not diluted of what the message is and our standing as a society providing that message comes through clearly. How and when do we disclose that as well, right? I think that's incredibly important when you talk about the ethics and the guardrails. We can quickly produce things that could accidentally hurt or cause harm, right? And I think it's really important while speed matters and getting things to market and engaging and being responsive, whether it's an app or anything that we do with members regardless of their generation. I think it's a great point. We have to have those guardrails in place. All these things are incredibly exciting, but they require governance. They require oversight. Especially around the use of AI. There has to still be the human element of oversight and review. We've had our lawyer talk about how he put in and got this great wonderful information back on all these court cases and we went back and looked at it. None of the court cases are real. So we have to make sure that we're reviewing and we're doing that. I think that human interaction is still vital to whatever technology we use. I cannot thank you guys enough for for this conversation. Thank you so much to those of you who asked questions and made comments. I really want to emphasize that we are all like we're in the midst of this journey. So I think there's so much more that we can discuss, we can share, we can be looking forward to how we invent the future for ourselves as societies by transitioning to meeting the needs of our Gen Y and Z members. I really hope that we can continue this conversation informally maybe over a glass of wine tonight and then you know what like I said we're working with CMSS staff to see if there are opportunities for us to convene together as a CMSS community to really help each other out as we are all looking to to make this transition within our societies so that we can continue the successes that that we've built on over these previous decades. So with that, thank you all. We ended on time.

Gen Y

Gen Z

Millennials

engagement

retention

digital tools

mentorship

diversity

gamification

AI