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Case Study: Investigator Meeting Engagement to Improve Event Management

case study

The Partnership

Miller Tanner Associates is a meeting planning company that provides cost-effective, technology-based solutions for your meeting and event needs. We use our advanced event technology and meeting planning expertise to help pharmaceutical companies discover how to more effectively train and engage their study sites.

We partnered with a pharmaceutical company whose initiative was aimed at improving investigator meetings’ content for more engagement, creating best practices for all future investigator meetings and measuring ROI.

The Challenge

Miller Tanner Associates were responsible for developing solutions for challenges related to improving the investigators’ training process for a more successful clinical trial. The objectives included:

  • Garner metrics to measure overall training effectiveness and investigators’ understanding of the clinical trial protocol
  • Manage the investigator meeting series more systematically
  • Optimize the meeting agenda for better knowledge retention
  • Increase attendance globally for the investigator meeting
  • Expand content engagement among investigators
  • Create a seamless, automated registration process
  • Track and address deviations in real time

The Solution

Our team of highly-skilled event technology experts and meeting planners designed a series of investigator meetings that surmounted these challenges. The Miller Tanner Associates team implemented a strategy that resulted in a more efficient process for our client’s management team and achieved higher engagement among the investigator site participants.

  • Consultation: Our team provided comprehensive event consultation from start to finish. We led our client through the best practices of creating an agenda that would increase content engagement and maximize the face-to-face meeting.
  • Client Event Web App: By using our advanced proprietary, customizable client event website, clinical trial managers had the ability to manage the event seamlessly in real time, address deviations that occurred, chat with our team through built-in instant messaging, and track all changes throughout the meeting as they occurred.
  • Attend Web App: Our paperless meeting web app made it easy for attendees to register within the system, follow agenda, and interact with the presenters.
  • Audience Engagement Platform: Our audience engagement platform provided a high level of interaction, allowing participants to ask questions and receive feedback live throughout the event.

The Results

By utilizing the solutions provided by Miller Tanner Associates, our client was able to greatly enhance the their program’s capability:

  • Exceeded its goal of 90 percent or higher positive response rate from investigators who attended the investigator meeting for the global study.
  • Increased site representation and attendance globally.
  • Manage the investigator meeting series more systematically with real-time deviation notifications and automated registration.
  • Improved overall engagement and efficiency with the ability to measure ROI of the investigator meeting by using our advanced event technology and our team of event experts.

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Using Video and Visual Content to Improve Your Onboarding

How video content and images can help improve onboarding and training

If you are looking for a creative approach to onboarding new employees, optimize your onboarding with video and visual content as part of your training.

At Miller Tanner Associates, we use our own VALTs, Virtual Assessment Learning and Training Source, for onboarding and to introduce new hires to all aspects of our company. We go a step further to create visual content that will improve engagement and excite our new employees about their new role with our company.

Training magazine has an excellent list of 10 reasons to optimize your onboarding with videos and visuals. Here’s our take on their list of reasons.

10 Reasons to Use Visuals and Videos to Improve Onboarding

  1. Helps retain learning and improves engagement: Knowledge retention and training engagement should be a priority of your training goals. Studies suggest that visual content improves retention. Text combined with visuals, like graphs, infographics, videos, and graphics, can increase comprehension and retention by 50 percent, making visuals the preferred method.
  2. Accommodates multiple styles of learning: By diversifying your content, you’ll have a greater chance of tapping into the different learning styles of your new employees.
  3. Allows you to address FAQs from new hires: Use visuals to address the most frequently asked questions by new hires. You can then repurpose these resources for future onboarding. This minimizes repetitive questions and back and forth emails within the company to more efficiently assist your new employees.
  4. Allows creativity with tutorials: You can turn boring content into a creative animated explainer video. Use infographics to explain complex procedures. Get creative with learning tools to increase engagement and knowledge.
  5. Establishes a company culture: Deliver your content to new hires with an enthusiastic onboarding video message from your CEO or with interviews with other employees. This gives insight into the personality and the company culture of their new colleagues.
  6. Enables distribution of your message to remote teams: Because Miller Tanner Associates is a virtual company with employees located around the world, we often use video to get our message to our team as a way to personalize company-wide communication and connect with our team members. Videos are an excellent method for delivering your message to a dispersed team.
  7. Showcases the work you do in various departments: Use it as an opportunity to highlight the work that each department does. For example, interview different departments to tell and show what they do through video. This is a great way to get other employees involved and convey company culture.
  8. Engages more feedback: Visual content and video can engage more feedback from your new hires. Follow up with a survey and find out what resonated most.
  9. Easy to create: With so many technology tools available, creating visual content and videos is easier than it has ever been. Use an iPhone to record and create impressive videos, free stock images to evoke attention, and Powerpoint’s built-in animation to design a more interactive tutorial.
  10. Better Content: The more you produce visually captivating content, the better your content will become. When you can measure the feedback from your viewers and the quality of the content overall, you’ll have a better gauge for how to improve on future content.

If you need help going virtual with your onboarding using our virtual training solutions, we’d be happy to assist. For more info about VALTs, watch the video:

Source: https://trainingmag.com/trgmag-article/10-reasons-videos-and-visual-content-optimize-onboarding/

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How to Improve Your Meetings and Trainings

Message from Mary Long, Chief Compliance Officer

Training yesterday versus today… 

When I first started working in the CRO industry (back when the dinosaurs roamed), the training of healthcare professionals selected to participate in an investigational trial took on two basic formats: 1) holding an investigator meeting that lasted at least 2-3 days and 2) site initiation visits that lasted all day at each site.  This is still the most common practice today; however, the time spent at the investigator meeting and the site initiation visits has been cut in half.  Investigational studies have not become less complex in nature, but the industry has invested and embraced technology. 

Back in the days of yore, investigator meetings (IMs) were grueling not only for the length of the meeting but for the audience and the presenters alike, primarily because the method of transferring large amounts of knowledge about the drug/molecule and detailed study procedures were provided by “stand and deliver” method only – rather than focused sessions with interactive communications and content engagement tools.  A site initiation visit was a repeat of the same materials to review with the site staff – you just had to talk faster!  If the statements above have you going down memory lane, then you also remember 3-part NCR CRF and paper data queries via fax.   

All I can say is thank goodness for change.    

Clients have now begun to engage with more effective platforms and methods for training to meet the needs of the audiences and to convey their critical messaging.  As clients begin to rethink their training approaches, they are asking themselves great questions:

  • What is the best forum to communicate their message?
  • What specifically does the audience need to understand about their study design and product?
  • What topic(s) not to include for their audience that already has knowledge/experience?
  • How best to engage an audience to actually participate in learning?  

With MTA’s proactive approach, over the past 20 + years, to advance and improve event experiences, the company has evolved from providing expertise in event planning and logistics to now becoming a true partner and collaborator with our clients.  By developing tools that help clients determine the best forum (face-to-face, virtual and/or hybrid), while sharing agenda content best practices, as well as content engagement ideas/platforms, and using video/audio captures for virtual training solutions, Miller Tanner is not just your ordinary event planner. MTA is much more.

Kind regards,

Mary Long, CCO
Add virtual training solutions to your 2019 resolutions. Right next to – work smarter, not harder. Full article

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Jenny Decker, CMP, Global Experience Manager – Events

The Miller Tanner difference is our people. That’s why we want to introduce you to our team of superstars that brings our corporate meetings and events to life for our clients.

Today we introduce you to Global Experience Manager – Events Jenny Decker, CMP. Jenny brings her extensive background in event management with expertise in conference and exhibition planning. As a Certified Meeting Professional (CMP), Jenny is a valuable asset to our team, planning both clinical and commercial events for our clients.

Continue reading “Jenny Decker, CMP, Global Experience Manager – Events”
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Measuring the Impact of Your Face-to-Face Event Using Data

How Data Impacts Your Face-to-Face meetings

Measuring ROI at Face-to-Face Events

Our clients often pose the question to the Miller Tanner Associates (MTA) team, “How can we prove to our key stakeholders that it is worth the investment of time, money and resources required for face-to-face events, when the efficiency and ease of virtual events is powerful and persuasive?” 

The simple answer is data.

This year, MTA’s focus has been to show data that supports how an event has “moved the needle” and achieved its goals offering a huge ROI for our clients. By using both pre- and post-meeting surveys, we can show that the face-to-face event impacted the attendee in a tangible, meaningful way.

Always practicing what we preach, MTA experimented with this at our own Annual Global Workshop. Since event management is listed as one of the top 5 most stressful careers, one of our key goals for the week was to increase each team member’s focus on personal work-life balance. By ensuring that our team stays in balance, with a healthy dose of self-care, they are able to continue supporting our clients and events with the stamina that this industry requires.  We endeavored to prove that time spent at our Workshop practicing work-life balance skills actually changed our team’s intended actions after the event. 

Pre-Meeting Survey

In our pre-meeting survey we asked, “How much time do you spend each day to ensure you have what you need to be productive and happy?” Here were the results:

Survey Results: How much time do you spend each day to ensure you have what you need to be productive and happy?

48% spent 15 minutes or more
41% spent 15 minutes or less
11% spent no time

Post-Meeting Survey

In the post-meeting survey we asked, “How much time each day do you think that you will spend in the future to ensure you have what you need to be productive and happy?” Here were the results:

Post-Meeting Survey Results: How much time do you spend each day to ensure you have what you need to be productive and happy?

83% intended to spend 15 minutes or more, an increase of 35%
17% intended to spend 15 minutes or less
0% intended to spend no time

We see these results as a huge victory!  We were able to prove that our time together significantly “moved the needle” and impacted the behavior of our attendees. Building off of this, we will collect data again next year to see if they were able to maintain this behavior.  Stay tuned for more details on how this focus impacts the brand loyalty of our team and the efficiency with which they work!

We have been working closely with many of our clients to help understand what their event goals are, design programs that support those intentions, and collect data to support the success of their endeavors; as a result, this allows them to prove ROI to their stakeholders for the investment of time, money and resources.

Are you ready to move the needle with us?

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