Let’s Get This Show on the Road!

What is an educational roadshow?An educational roadshow is a series of regional medical educational meetings, each with the same format, speaker faculty and agenda.

Why hold an educational roadshow?While the costs involved in running an educational roadshow will obviously be higher than holding one national meeting, the benefits of being able to disseminate your brand’s key messages at a local level will outweigh this.

There are a number of benefits to holding a number of meetings at a local level, as opposed to one large national meeting:

1. Having many smaller meetings rather than one big one will give the meetings more of an intimate feeling, and allow delegates to feel more involved in the meetings

2. By holding the meeting locally, delegates will understand that this is a local issue, relevant to their region

3. Certain aspects of the meeting can be adapted to reflect local concerns and issues

4. Taking the meeting to the delegates, rather than the other way round, makes it more convenient for delegates to attend, and also allows a potentially huge increase in your brand’s advocacy base across the country

5. By reaching more advocates across the country, you will not only disseminate your brand’s key messages locally, but also establish you as provider of topical and high quality educational meetings

Making a good roadshow excellentAs with any meeting, there will be a number of logistical issues, such as venue size and location, faculty members and meeting content to consider. However, due to the regional and multiple-meeting format of a roadshow, there are a few additional points which, if considered in advance, can turn a good meeting into an excellent one.

1. Faculty members: With a regional meeting, it is ideal if your speakers have local kudos as well as being national leaders in their field. With an educational roadshow, this can present a problem in that each meeting of the roadshow will have a different local audience, and therefore will ideally require a different local speaker. As

mentioned above, the idea of an educational roadshow is to have the same agenda, with the same travelling faculty presenting at each meeting. A compromise is to have a fixed faculty that travel to each meeting, and a different local key opinion leader to chair each meeting.

2. Delegate recruitment: Having a local chair help recruitment from their local hospital or trust. Additionally, involving the local field force in this process will not only benefit the meeting by capitalising on their local knowledge, but will also allow them to feel more involved in the project.

3. Longevity: As with any successful meeting, there are a number of outputs that can extend the life of the roadshow. A meeting report from one of the meetings can be produced and distributed to attending delegates, as well as by the field force to those who were unable to attend. The roadshow can become an annual event, visiting different cities each year in order to extend the reach even further.

4. Keeping spirits up: Roadshows can be exhausting! And if you are feeling out of energy, so will your faculty members. Don’t forget, they will also most likely have fulltime jobs to handle on top of your roadshow, so be patient, be gracious and most of all stay enthusiastic!