From “See You Next Year” to Continuous Learning: How ASA Launched a Video-First Learning Library (2 Hours/User/Month)

In this episode of Digital Innovator Circle, Bozidar Jovicevic sits down with Vince Loffredo, Ed.D., Chief Learning Officer at the American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA), President of the Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions, and Vice Chair of ACCME.

Vince shares how ASA set a bold north star: become a video-first, mobile-first, 365-day learning organization—and why the annual meeting should be the kickoff of a year-round clinical conversation, not the end of it.

They unpack ASA’s shift to a Netflix/Disney+ style learning library (ASA+), what it takes to align a large association around a unified strategy, and the early performance signals that show traction—even starting with a “clean slate” content constraint.

Early results discussed:

• ~11 hours of watch time per user over ~5–6 months (≈ 2 hours per user per month)
• 9.2 videos watched per user (avg.)
• NPS 65 (based on early responses)
• 65% email open rate and ~3% click rate on weekly recommendations

Vince also gives candid peer advice on what blocks innovation most in associations—and how to navigate it: fear of change and finance, plus the need to “run two runways” during the transition from transactional, single-year on-demand sales to a relationship-based subscription model.

Timestamps

00:00 – Intro + why Vince is a leading voice in CME

03:00 – The core problem: disjointed experiences + “see you next year” model

05:10 – Why streaming habits matter (Netflix vs. Disney+ as a mental model)

09:55 – Executive alignment: why CEO buy-in is foundational

13:45 – Why annual meeting on-demand sales fade quickly—and what to do instead

16:55 – “Video-first” strategy: why video is the best base format

20:05 – Evermed-first, LMS second: designing a seamless learner ecosystem

23:20 – Launch execution: why 90-day delivery + weekly collaboration matters

27:55 – Mobile app pivot: what changed and why it matters

29:10 – Early engagement metrics: watch time, videos/user, NPS, email performance

31:15 – Content strategy: Originals, chunking into 10-minute episodes, weekly drops

33:05 – Advocacy content as a member value driver (and a traffic engine)

36:50 – Monetization: bridging from on-demand to subscription + expanding the library

41:55 – Vince’s advice to peers: understand the member + design for mobile-first

45:20 – The 2 biggest blockers: fear and finance—and “two runways” planning

48:40 – Board/CFO narrative: investment logic + path to net-neutral and growth

Resources mentioned

• ACCME (Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education)
• Alliance for Continuing Education in the Health Professions (ACEHP)
• Council of Medical Specialty Societies (CMSS) 
• Streaming analogies referenced: Netflix, Disney+, Apple TV+
  
  

If you’re a medical association leader trying to modernize education, increase year-round engagement, or transition from one-off product sales into a scalable subscription model, this is a practical blueprint—plus a reality check on what actually gets in the way.

Host: Bozidar Jovicevic (Evermed)

Guest: Vince Loffredo, Ed.D. (ASA)

🔗 Resources

→ If you want to unlock engagement and revenue from your content, click here to request a 30-minute strategic consultation with Evermed’s co-founder (not a sales cal

Learn more about Evermed: https://www.evermedtv.com

Connect with Bozidar Jovicevic: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjovicevic

About ACC Anywhere: https://start.accanywhere.acc.org/

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello and welcome to a new episode of the Digital Innovators Circle podcast. Today I have a special guest, Vince Lofredo, and he is currently the Chief Learning Officer at the American Society of Anesthesiology. He is also a president of the Alliance of Continued Medical Education, popularly known as the Alliance, and is also the vice chair of the ACCME. This is all to say that Vince is a recognized strategic innovative education leader in the space and is a prominent voice in the space. And today I also wanted to share that the way we met, it was pretty clear to me immediately what he does and who I'm speaking with. It was a panel at the CMSS conference about two years ago that he was chairing. I was in the audience and I made a few comments from the audience and we started to kind of interact, like the two of us. And then we had an hour-long conversation after that. And one thing was clear to me that we share passion for advancing education, oftentimes through technology nowadays, but in many other ways, the passion for really amplifying the impact of medical education. Since then, we had many different conversations. And we, as Evermed, started to work together last year. It was around May time where we started to work together and launch ASA Plus, a Netflix-style library for on-demand content, which we'll talk about today as a kind of a case study. So, Vince, um, first of all, welcome. Really glad to have you here that we'll have this conversation. Thank you so much for having me, Bosy. I'm excited to be here today. All right, great. As I said, we'll talk in the context of a case study. So, what I'd love to learn a little bit more is um you were relatively new at the ASA at the time, and I was wondering what the situation was, what was happening in the organization that led to this idea to approach new ways uh with uh to deal with uh education as well as starting with conference recordings.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Yeah, great. Uh it's a great place to start. Actually, uh when we met Bosey, I was actually with another organization at that time. So I was still with the American Academy of Family Physicians, but I had moved after we met to ASA. So your whole point of this being coming into a situation and evaluating and trying to better understand uh the landscape of our programs at ASA was really instrumental at the very beginning. And, you know, one of the things that we were that I noticed first off was that we really needed to establish an educational strategy that was focused on continuous engagement with the learner and also outcomes-based. So we spent the first year really trying to reshape our organization to have that focus. We wanted to have, in addition to that, 365 continuous engagement and uh learner focused, it was also to be mobile first. We wanted a mobile first strategy. So the ability to do all of that, to integrate, as you mentioned, from a streaming platform, like a streaming platform would do from a computer to a device seamlessly, was going to be important to us. Uh, we were looking for those ways for users to gather all of the content in one place. We were very disjointed at the time. You know, we had a lot of really great products, but people didn't have a really uniformed way to get to them, especially our video products. So when you're trying to create a 365 or continuous engagement model, and what is that? I need to go talk about that first before we can get into where we're going with Evermed. It is the ability to say that when you go to an annual conference, we've for so long have been in the realm of saying, thank you for coming to our annual conference, we'll see you again next year. And what we want to do is say, welcome to the annual conference. A one-hour session to talk about this very deep clinical aspect is not enough time. We haven't even begun to talk about how your practice relates to that clinical environment. So, let alone the ability and the need to continue the clinical conversation. We need to tie some of your practice-based information to that. We didn't even talk about how to bill and code for that. So, how do we do that? We do that by keeping the learner engaged throughout the year. We leverage the annual meeting to be or conference to be the kickoff of that conversation. That's what we want to use that for. So we wanted to create a content library that continues that conversation. So we wanted the challenge that we were challenged with was really to coordinate our content with the ability to expand. Part of the challenge that we had too was that our library at the time was not our own. So we had partnered with a third-party vendor to sell our on-demand product. Unfortunately, that that vendor was overpromising and underperforming. So we knew that at the end of that contract, that we wanted to do something different. And that's where our conversation came from, Bosey and how we got talking is how do we leverage? And one of the things that I think about all the time with education is how do we leverage what we're training a consumer to do in their natural environment outside of their work or learning environment? And you so poignantly pointed out that you know there's Netflix or streaming services that we leverage, that we've grown accustomed to use, to getting our videos and our movies and our TV series on demand or bingeable, that I could sit there and just watch one episode after another. I don't have to wait a week for the next one. So how do we create how do we leverage what we're training people to do naturally and daily into how we provide educational content? And you know, I know you you you like to use the term Netflix. I like to use, if we're gonna spit platforms, Disney Plus. Why do I say the difference? Because Disney is for me, is one of those things that if you think about it, if I pull out any one of those platforms within Disney, like Marvel, Star Wars, Disney itself, Pixar, Nat Geo, Hulu, ESPN, all of those could actually be sold independently by themselves, but collectively, together, they are stronger together. And it gives the consumer an ample library of content to consume for hours and hours. And that is the essence of what we're trying to achieve by leveraging the EverMed platform into our educational ecosystem. And it's actually going to be the centerport point of our educational ecosystem. So we want to, that's how we got started. That's how we got met some of the challenges that we were being uh presented to us. And then also leveraging what we know in terms of data and information. I work with some great colleagues that I met and present with on a regular basis that from the Council for Medical Specialty Societies, where we really research learner preferences. And it started with our data from post-COVID pandemic time. But more recently we've focused on what are new learners, what are physicians that are in that 40 and under, what are they looking for? And how do they learn? Because we have to teach that way. And what I mean by that is it is a lot easier for me to get somebody who is mid to late career in medicine to learn a new technology on in terms of education, a new format or a new digital experience, then it is the reverse. Taking somebody who's coming from an a med school digital uh digital first experience into a didactic, PowerPoint, big room lecture. So this is where our world collided and have really merged and taken off since we first met.

SPEAKER_00 8:43

Yeah, and I'm really excited. I remember that still called that first conversation life. Like I felt both of us enthused about what's what's possible during the transition also between two organizations. So you mentioned in terms of challenges, because in order to do any project like this, there has to be, of course, a problem worth solving, right? And you mentioned a few things like disjointed disjointed content delivery, so content being in different places. You mentioned even a massive structural problem, which is not owning the rights to use your content. I mean, that's a showstopper immediately, period. There's no conversation after that. Uh, so that's one, and then also like the overall, overall user experience uh that was there. Now, in a large organization such as ASA, what was at that time the overall either support that you had, or was it we absolutely need to do something about this? Or different parts were we have to do it, some parts were no, yes or no? I'm asking because especially for large associations, sometimes it's quite hard organizationally to break through different silos and get that level of support and executive support in order to proceed, no matter how much enthusiasm there is in the in from the individuals.

SPEAKER_01 9:52

That is such a great question, and actually it's foundational. It's almost the answer to that is almost the first thing you have to solve before you can do anything. And I was very fortunate that in coming over to ASA, I have the opportunity and pleasure to work with our CEO, Brian Riley. Brian is a visionary, and when him and I talked about coming over to ASA and the challenges that they were facing and how he thought that we were really becoming somewhat stale in our approach. It's almost a wash, rinse, repeat type of just going through the motions. Thanks for coming to the annual meeting. See you again next year. All things I was mentioning earlier. And we had long conversations about my vision and also his need to try and elevate and revolutionize our educational approach. And so we shared the vision together. As a matter of fact, I don't know if you remember this or know this, but he had seen you went to your the uh your vendor booth prior to me going to your vendor booth, and we both came back and had this conversation about meeting the guys from EverMet and how we thought that could be a vital piece to uh to um to our future. And it's it's ironic, and I'm not just saying that. That was a true story, but it starts with having an aligned approach with decision makers, with the people that you know know where you have to go and know how to get there or trust how to get there with the folks that have that vision that and put it in place.

SPEAKER_00 11:33

Yeah, thanks for sharing that. It was um it was really interesting to hear how that happened and the time you're transitioning in between. And and I still remember after that the call had with the two of you, how things started to take off from there. Now, interesting what you said. I want to come back a little bit to that, that the conference content. I I somehow find it sad that scenario of the conference being see you next year, what you said. And I think that's a very important point because to me, I think of all the work that goes into preparing the annual meeting. On one side, you had you have multiple people spending 12 months doing the entire programming, scientific programming, coordinating so many things. That's a massive effort. Then you have speakers, right? And I happen to know one of them very, very well for the anesthesiology conference, and they spend between 30 to 40 hours, based on what I've been seeing, to prepare, to present, to do the slides, to format and everything. And then all of that gets recorded, which is tens of thousands, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. So capturing, so all this is massive effort, and then it somehow dies off after like 30 days in some sort of a system, like LMS systems, which are great, but they're designed for compliance, not for really day-to-day engagement, they're designed for courses, or on some websites plus Vimeo kind of thing, and everything goes away. So it's it's kind of sad. And as you I really like how you frame it as an as how you talk about it, as an anchor from which you can develop. If there was a one-hour conversation, there are many people that would want to have continued conversation about the landmark clinical trial or a new device, a new procedure, a new medicine, a new something, scientific basic breakthrough in research. And it should be anchor and not uh for the continuous engagement throughout the year and not just one office here next year. I think it's it just wanted to stress that out how important it is.

SPEAKER_01 13:31

Yeah, just to add to that, Bosey, if you think about it, and I mean you probably have data to support this too, but within two different organizations, what I noticed was that when we sell our annual meeting on demand, okay, we obviously the day of the week of you're selling like hotcakes, right? Like you're everybody wants a piece of it. There were meet, there were sessions they didn't get to see, so they want to buy the whole package, all of great reasons to do it. But as you get days and weeks post-conference, what do you start seeing with those sales? They start to diminish. When you start looking at the uh by you know, when we have a uh a um conference in October, by January, sales are almost down to small percentage points to nothing. But the consumption starts to wane really quick as the further you get away from your conference because why new information is being introduced through journals, through conversations and other research that's happening. So it is vital for your relevance as a an education provider, as if in our case as an association, to say this is the one place in a conference where you're gonna get all of it all at once. However, it cannot stop here. We have to keep it going. We have to keep this conversation going because new things will transpire within the next 11 months. There's more context to what's going on, social context, payer context. There's so many different things that can transpire in what you're doing. Uh technology could expand. So you have to keep that conversation going. You leverage these starting points. And for us, you know, we have a clinical annual conference in October, but then we turn right around in in the end of January and have our practice conference. So those are those are not just they're two different launching points for two different types of education, but they can also be capstone places. So as you keep that conversation going, you can capstone it going from like 101 level to 201 level, as I think of the university type education.

SPEAKER_00 15:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:48

But you know, taking it to the next level the next year and then continuing the conversation.

unknown 15:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:53

Well, thanks for sharing that. And then I remember that uh when we started the conversation, you and Brian and I had a meeting, and then after that, there was a big meeting. There were the 20 plus people from the ASA. So if you still recall some of those conversations, so what is really that stood out? What drove the idea of, okay, we need to unify content, we need to have a personalized library. And how did you feel about those conversations in terms of strategy, tactics, plans, things like that? They will be great to share, and especially since sometimes when I talk to a more conservative leadership in a traditional association, oftentimes the thinking is, oh, we need a new LMS. And then two years later, after the new LMS is implemented, the problem is not solved because LMS is great for courses and compliance, et cetera. So I was curious what really stood out for you made you think actually this is the right way to go, and this is a different way to deliver the content.

SPEAKER_01 16:50

So, you know, you're really asking the proverbial age-old question, Bosey, which comes first, the chicken or the egg, in a lot of ways. Because you bring up the LMS, which is we are in, we are currently in the process of looking for a new LMS. And you have to ask yourself, do you want where's your focal point? Where's your future? So as we started to strategize and figure out where we wanted to go, we know that the medium that we can work with, and something that I had told before we even signed on to with Evermed, and even had our first conversation, I had told my team that we are a video first organization. We are going to become a video first organization. You say, why video? There's so many other means. You've got e-manuscripts, you've got you've got podcasts that are blowing up and everything else. Well, because from a from a video, I can create the other two. Through the leveraging and the use of AI, I can create a podcast or a uh a recorded audio of whatever video I'm making. I can take that video and that recording, plug it into AI, and I can get a e-manuscript of what for those who like to read. So the idea of personalizing what you're doing can start from an infrastructure at the ground level through a video that I can't do through the others as well. So we knew that we wanted video to be foundational. So if video is going to be foundational, how are we going to leverage that video and what is the plan around it? So it goes back to that whole 365 strategy, content strategy, aligning what we're going to do. So for us, what we're doing is taking all of our educational inputs, meaning our journals, our live meeting, the annual conference, and our education. And we're creating an ecosystem where all of those things are aligned. So when you, when a member or somebody from the outside comes in and says, What information is ASA providing this month? It is coordinated. Something we didn't have in the past. That the articles that you're seeing in journals are aligned with the education that's videos that are being presented at the same time. So that was where our conversation went and where we wanted to go. Now let's go back to the chicken and the egg. So by doing that, we wanted to start with video. We wanted to start with a partner that could help us expand our library quickly. So how do we reach more people? How do we get out? Think about, again, let's go back to some of the things that I harp on, which is what are we training people to do? Think Twitter, think TikTok, think any social media platform where people are going to to get quick information. You want to know how to fix a light? Get on YouTube. You want to hear what the latest thing's going on? Get on to Twitter or or uh TikTok or whatever you get your count your information from. Because you want it quickly and you want it immediately, and you want to be on top of things. So we wanted to start with that medium. We want to give it that video medium. And what we're doing is we're saying now as we go into the RFP process for our LMS. Um I had this couple, this conversation not but a week ago with a couple of LMS vendors who approached me at the uh Alliance Annual Conference. And I was very clear that we are a now Evermed first organization, that the LMS will have to speak to Evermed. And the reason that we have to do that is that our overall goal of being an educational strategy mobile first means that we have to provide a user experience that is unlike any other. How do we provide when you have an LMS that's with one organization and the video coming from another organization? How do you provide that ecosystem so that when the member themselves gets online and says, I have one click to go and get everything? That's where we're going to create. It doesn't mean that they don't know on the backside it's taking them to two different places and two different platforms. They should never know that. They should be able to get into one ecosystem and be able to get everything they need there. And that's why we went with video first and find an LMS partner that can meet our video needs.

SPEAKER_00 21:30

Yeah. And uh yeah, what really struck me, thanks for sharing that. And what really strikes me is how much you're focused on the user experience. Because I don't find that very often, because oftentimes the focus is more on content. Do we have enough content? Is it credible? Does it have CME credits? And content, of course, is core, it's important. But the experience consists of content and the content delivery mechanism, and that continuous surfacing of the right content to the right person, both on page and make big. Making it binge worthy, but also after they leave, having the similar email that said, Hey, you may want to watch this video next, saving you time to find that content. But just the fact that you had clarity on a video first, the user experience, personalization, similar to what people are used to nowadays, not only younger physicians, everyone in Used to is used to a great user experience. No one needs an explanation of what it is. It's really powerful in that it can work together with an LMS because LMSs are great for structured learning and courses and certification. Definitely none of our clients stopped using an LMS. So they continue to use LMS for that, or use us for more like a learning experience, day-to-day platform that works in a in a complements uh the the what they do with the structured learning. And then somewhere, I think around May, we started to work together last year. And what we commit actually, we use it in our messaging, but that's actually it's in our contracts that we're going to deliver and launch in 90 days, because we know that a lot of associations have been burned, honestly, with six months and 12 months implementation of various software systems. So we say, look, it's not only that we say this, this is in the contract. We're going to deliver in 90 days if we get everything from you. And typically it's around that time. Sometimes it's 10 days plus minus if we don't get everything on time. So anything that you were that surprised you in that process that you've been hearing from the team, I know there were a lot of people involved from your organization, has been a very uh great partner, honestly, so far. It's been very uh looking at it from various different angles, and it's very strategic for the ASA, what we're doing. So I was wondering anything you can share from the experience or what you've been hearing also from your teams?

SPEAKER_01 23:37

Yeah, two things. First of all, generally, to your point, you have to have you have to be thinking about that communication, right? So you when you sit there and say 90 days, the reason that you want to have that that that type of structure around what you're doing is that what we know today through so many different analytics with all the different Google and and Amazon and everything and social media and live streaming is that we're collecting more and more data on how people function. And so understanding that you can have a great idea, but if your time to production it takes you six months, a year or longer, you're gonna you are going to miss out on an opportunity to connect with a culture that somebody else is gonna swoop right in and do because they were quicker to time to to distribute. So I always have this sense of urgency of trying to get things out faster and to do the things that we need to do to get there quickly. So we had to make sure that our infrastructure was set up before we could sign that contract, before we could get into it, we wanted to make sure that we set EverMet up for success because you're gonna need stuff from us and we're gonna want to make sure we have everything ready versus you ask for something and then we've got to go figure it out. So going into it, understanding what is needed to get where you need to go to get to that 90 days was instrumental in all the pre-work that we did. And as you know, then the amount of conversations that we had back and forth between our teams was crucial. Not just to lead up to it, but it's still crucial today. We meet on a regular basis, once a week, to go over what's working, what's not working, what's the next steps and what we're where we're going. So ultimately, it comes down to communication. And Evermed has been excellent in their communication back to us. We have asked for some really interesting things, I think, at times, you know, for from, you know, give us a three-minute video that we can put up at the annual meeting to, hey, we've got a we're going in front of a board and we need to be able to show them what we're gonna do. Evermed's been extremely responsive, and we've had some really good feedback from those that we show these things to. So it's that kind of communication and understanding and partnership through collaboration and guided discovery. I tell my team all the time, Bosey, we're gonna push Evermed to their limits. They, I think you as an organization have been really on the cusp of something big, but no one's ever pushed you to get even bigger in terms of what capabilities this medium has. And I continue to push you today, as I know.

SPEAKER_00 26:42

Yeah, and I appreciate that. And I think that's that I think the initial enthusiasm energy that I mentioned, I think keeps growing and growing and growing because now we started to work together in the meantime. And and one thing I might say that I really appreciate, and I said it also to both your CEO and chief membership officer when I when I met them at the CMSS meeting like three three months ago. Uh, ASA is a large organization, and oftentimes it's very hard to get people to roll in the same direction. I feel like with this project with really many different constituents from many different departments, from often 20 plus people during the first 90 days of getting to the launch of the platform and everything, I feel like there was a very collaborative, very clear vision, everyone rolling in the same direction, very strategic, connecting to other parts of the overall strategy. And I and I made a point to both of them that from my angle, working with like different organizations and my organization, seeing how that works, it's very rare to see a very large association where people are aligned, low ego, collaborative, results driven, and know where they're going. And then when you know they start to push us, push us, quote unquote, actually in a positive way to say, hey, have you guys thought of this? Yeah, yeah, have you guys thought of that? I think this is where we, as primary technology companies, is where we want to go because it's a new feature-led development where clients and end users are coming with their different ideas and use cases. This is the best way to continue to refine and develop a product because it's informed by what's needed, not by one person thinking, oh, maybe we should do that because it looks good. So I continue to appreciate it. So please keep doing that.

SPEAKER_01 28:21

And look, the byproduct of that is we're gonna launch with an app. That wasn't something we originally talked about when we set this all up, but we started challenging each other in terms, and again, in a very positive way, of what could we do? What could this look like? How do we maintain this whole mobile? And you responded and are delivering, uh, which is huge, huge to the success of what we're trying to accomplish.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

Yeah, 100%. I think the mobile app for iOS and Android bring these additional abilities, which will drive more engagement and also unlock more revenue. But ability that you will always logged in, you can download even when you're on a plane and watch and have push notifications to drive personalized notifications again, not just blast. I think it's really powerful. And then um talking about the results, I have a have in front of me some of the results pulled up from my team. Also ask you to comment on some of that. Also, specifically, sometimes I get asked the question do we have enough content? And in in your situation, you had a constraint. You couldn't use last three to five years of content because associations often use that. You started with, okay, have a clean slate. I need to start from somewhere, have a big annual meeting and another second annual meeting, and then other types of libraries start with that. And even with one or two annual meetings, one bigger, one smaller, you're already, and I'll I'll share some of this. My team pulled like yesterday, put out, they have uh engagement. And just want to clarify that because engagement is a little bit of an abstract word, it means different things to different people. The way when we talk about engagement, we mean how much time do people spend watching or viewing, if it's video, audio, PDF, so viewing, and how often do they come back? And we often talk about okay, what's the average view time per user per month? Because that metric is a very, very hard metric. So what I've seen is so far that, and this has been since September, so it's like five, six months, it's 11 hours per user. If you divide that by five months, that's a lot of watch time. It's uh two hours per user per month. Also, average videos watched per user is 9.2, which is again, and it's like many one conference and one other source, and of course it's going to grow. So I was really pleasantly surprised to see very good results that this is in the in the top 20%. And it's interesting. Oftentimes we ask associations, well, how does it compare to what you had? And oftentimes it's very hard to find the metrics. Oftentimes we hear, well, you know, only five or 10% of our content ever got watched in the past, and now we're getting most of the content watched and watched repeated. Apart from the engagement, I'm curious from your level being in the C level, C level position. I have some more metrics to share, but what are you hearing from your team or from end users? And sometimes doctors actually send emails to the executive staff.

SPEAKER_01 31:11

Yeah, so we've had nothing but positive feedback from the very beginning. I think some of the things that that have helped with this is that we do have a structured approach to get people engaged. What does that mean? It means that we have moved from these, you know, you think about what somebody gets when they buy an on-demand product from their annual meeting. What are they going to get? They're going to get 100 videos and an hour long, which is great. Good content. What we do is that we have taken those three segments that you or two collections that you talked about, our two different annual meetings right now. And what we're doing when we launch in May is going to be a third collection, which is our ASA originals. Those are the conversations I mentioned earlier that are going to move from those annual meetings into um new original content, that is uh continue to learn content on those topics. Now, why is that so important? It's important because when we do the continue to learn, we can ask an educator, a faculty member, to speak about a topic for 40 minutes. And we can break it up into 10-minute chunks. And by doing so, we can get them into that Netflix style of learning by saying every Monday at 8 a.m., we're gonna launch the next portion of that series. So in one recording, which we could do at the annual meeting now, after somebody's off stage, bring them into a room, record them for another hour or so, and then break that up into smaller chunks and say, now I've got another whole month worth of stuff to release. So that I think is what's helping with the amount of videos to consume. The other thing that we're we're doing is, you know, they want more content outside of just clinical, what we're hearing. So one of the thoughts that we're doing is we have a lot, we do a lot of work that's just not, for lack of a better term, sellable. So when you talk about advocacy, you're not gonna turn that into a necessarily a CE product and then go sell it, like you would a clinical piece. So what we're doing by leveraging that is now we're creating a a schedule where we have our lead people in DC recording once a week a five-minute, three to five minute piece about the work they did on the hill for that week. So, what does that do? By us being able to upload that into a collection, into a playlist, now we have things that are going to drive. Why are people members of a member society? Advocacy, education are two of the biggest things. So advocacy can be the driver, the content for advocacy can be the driver to the content that uh we're doing educationally. And so for us, just even having the data that you're supplying is so beneficial. With our last vendor I told you that we ended our contract with, we had no idea. We had no idea what consumption was. You know, just getting these early results and understanding them and aligning them with what we're hearing from our users about the ease of use and the relevancy and the real-time, actionable stuff that they can do that's coming to them in the moment, is and easily accessible, is I think vital.

SPEAKER_00 34:32

Yeah. No, thanks for thanks for sharing that. Um, I again, because there was a content from one year worth of conferences, basically, two conferences, and to have such engagement and then hearing you talk about originals, which is I can feel a natural revolution. A lot of time I I I want to comment on that. I talk to associations and they're a little bit afraid of the innovation, which is normal, but because of that, they try to go getting the more perfectionistic mindset saying, let's let's get everything, and until we get everything perfectly together and all the content, let's not start. And I think this is the enemy of innovation because you decided, okay, clean slate. I cannot cry over spoil like spilled milk, like we don't have three years of conference recordings, we don't have the rights. We'll start this year, you have two conferences, and you get such engagement numbers, is phenomenal. And it and then you start to get into this, okay, what else can we do? And that is really, you know, when they say progression, progress over perfection, and this is really what it is. And I've seen uh some other numbers which I want to comment on again. Numbers like amazing so far. MPS score. So one thing we do for all of our clients in the lower right corner, end user physician, always gets asked the question on a scale of one to 10 how likely are you going to recommend this to your colleague? And then there is a formula, and then for ASA Plus, it's 65 based on like 80 plus responses, which is amazing. If it's above above 30, it's considered great or 40. I think it's outstanding. So 65, starting with that with that conjust at the very, very beginning. I want to stress that out. Email rates are 65%, open rates. I know normally like weekly newsletters from associations get about 40% because these are useful email. They recommend a piece of content. Click rate about 3%. So all those look great. I mean, I'm so excited about you know getting pushed in a positive way to build new features, such as uh native mobile app, also expand content. Like you were the one of the first associations we had a conversation about the originals. That's another example of being pushed because I remember coming to a meeting and we had a deep conversation about this and how to set it up in a way that's not overwhelming. And the other part is uh monetization. I think you started with uh again, early on. Of course, you could wait for three years and figure it out everything perfectly, but I think you decided to start with a subscription, and then several other models, of course, naturally will emerge. And I know there is a plan for that. But if you could speak a little bit to that of a decision on how to really offer this to the market a little bit, that would be great.

SPEAKER_01 37:00

Yeah, so what we did was we didn't want to wait. We did not want to wait for our members to get what they needed. So what we did was we still did what we've done in the past, which was to sell an on-demand product at our annual meeting. The only difference was the on-demand product now is our Evermint product line. So it created a whole new experience for our learners. And really, what we're doing is we were trying to buy time to get us to our launch of our subscription. Our subscription is going to be a uh subscription that is starting out with our video from our our the annual meeting that I just mentioned, and the last two of our our meeting practice-based annual meeting, which we call advanced. So having those two to start and now getting our collections going, our own originals going of that, when we launch, we will have a beginning level of uh number of originals, but we'll have all of this contact in context into one. Three big collections going into one for the consumer. So going from selling it independently, so selling our annual conference as an on-demand product and then our practice on demand annual meeting as uh its own on-demand product, taking those two unique things and combining them into one and adding into the originals that keep those conversations going is where we're launching. And you know, we did a lot of market research around this. Uh, we we really looked at what others were doing, and uh we think that we've hit the sweet spot, at least to start. And much like anything else, I mean, think about when Apple TV launched, it was charging$4.99 a month. Why? Because they didn't have Ted Lasso yet, they didn't have the morning show yet, they didn't have all these things that they wanted to do, just like Netflix. Netflix owned the rights to a lot of the Disney work before there was Disney Plus, because Disney saw Netflix as a medium to get their own stuff out there. Then when they saw how much Netflix was making off of them, they said, maybe we should do our own. And we're kind of, in a way, doing some similar things. We're starting with what we already have. Eventually, we can get into curation from others. You know, we don't have to invent everything. We can start leveraging other people's videos. Everything we can do to expand the library. That's the right now, that's the big mantra for our team is can it go into the library? How do we expand the education content library so that it can get bigger so that there's more for people to consume and the more want to do it? So you're not so focused on those individual sales. Now you're looking at establishing a relationship, uh, an ongoing relationship with someone that's a purchaser that sees that they're getting value for what they're spending their dollar on. And that's where our business model came from.

SPEAKER_00 40:12

You just said so many things that we could spend an hour talking about. I know in the context of that now, we'll go into or just comment on it. The first thing I'm hearing from you is uh consolidation. And that is really powerful. And I oftentimes, when I meet an association for the first time, I say, look, whether you work with us or not, please consolidate as much as possible of your on-demand content. Like courses, okay, stay on LMS, conference recordings, webinar libraries, podcasts with CME credits, um, any video libraries, oftentimes in surgery. There are a lot of video libraries. Like just put them in one place so people don't need to pull their hair out to find the content. And I think it's really powerful. And you mentioned relationship, the word relationship. When I've seen that with associations, when they move from a catalog-like selling of a single-year content access, you know, little by little, to having an all-in-one library, the nature of the interaction changes from being transactional to an ongoing relationship. And that means that you can have a subscription product. And I often say associations are actually great at subscriptions because membership is a subscription. And so member associations know what it means to have a relationship or should have this transaction. So I think it's extremely powerful. It's just the idea of consolidation and a subscription and doing it as soon as possible with that sense of urgency that you are talking about. And the second point is this expansion of a library. And this is where I think progress over perfection is because you started with what you had, and immediately after the first result, you get momentum. And now suddenly conversations are not anymore, oh, we are locked into different systems, we actually are stuck, we cannot. We are now discussing how to grow from here, how to build even bigger momentum, how to go from not like how do we not lose or keep membership keep styles over how do we win? And I think going from that to that mindset is uh is really powerful and is a natural kind of evolution once you like do the first two steps. Which brings me to the question for you, the the end of this conversation, which could last much longer. Not everyone in the space is uh naturally innovator and wants to try new things and you know push forward. So, what is your uh the advice that you give to peers when they're thinking on how to modernize education, unlock new revenue streams? Because I feel like that's on everyone's strategic priorities, but not everyone is doing it.

SPEAKER_01 42:42

If you're in a member society like ours, your whole foundation is built on membership. And so you have to understand membership first. So, whatever model you're creating, you need to understand the member. And I'm gonna so I'm gonna pick solely on those that are member societies for the moment because that's where our wheelhouse is. But if you think about it, you can extrapolate to any other line here. We have a group of people that are being educated differently than those who are creating the education were years ago. So the dichotomy between a new professional and a more senior professional is growing exponentially wider and wider and wider by the day. Asking someone who has grown up in a tech age to do something that is more didactic in nature is going to be a struggle, as I mentioned earlier. So one of the things that we do is that we really dig into med schools. I want we my team will speak to one to four med schools a year to understand from a curriculum standpoint how they're leveraging technology. When you consider that med schools are moving towards case based, problem based learning. When med schools are being built, as I used, I came from higher education and was part of the University of Kansas Medical Center, where we built a building that was five stories tall, one story for interprofessional education, four for med school. Not one lecture hall on those floors. It was 36 rooms, 68 people to a room, case-based, problem-based learning, heavy simulation. So take that forward. The reason I bring it up is take that forward through residency into early career. Now they're expecting to get that same level of personalized, interactive, digital experience because all their lectures were podcasted. So we have to understand where technology is going, how it's being leveraged in order for us to be effective and continue to bring in those new members by giving them what they want in the space that they need it in. And as we all know, that mobile space is crucial. This is a group of people that grew up with cell phones. Mobile first becomes almost a priority.

SPEAKER_00 45:17

And do you think there's anything that stands in the way when you talk to your peers that like you feel like everyone is aware, like we should do something for younger physicians, we should innovate, we should do this. Is it oftentimes the the what do you usually say to them? Because one thing just go do it. But for most people, and they uh I wish, but I could, and sometimes it stands there. Just wondering what's your kind of peer-to-peer advice?

SPEAKER_01 45:41

I'm gonna give you two things that I think people struggle with fear and finance. They struggle with the fear of change and people who will fight some of the change to keep it in a in a wash rent repeat mode because it's comfortable. Get out of your comfort zone. Understand and know your audience. Understand and know what they're doing every day in their life because you need to replicate what they're doing every day in their life. Do not fear change, do not fear failure. We wouldn't have 99% of the things that we work with on a daily basis, no matter what it is, if somebody didn't fail the first time trying to get it done right. Don't feel failure. Finance is the other big thing I see is people having a thing. They'll say, that sounds all good for you, but our entire budget is based on these product lines, the way they've been going for so long. We can't just stop what we're doing. We've got to, we've got to keep those things going. So it's getting hard for us to innovate. Yes, that is hard to do, and yes, that's a reality. But you have to run two runways at the same time. You've got to figure out, and that's why you have to develop a strategy with outcomes. What is your strategy to get out of the rut that you're in doing it the way you've been doing it? You're gonna have to run two runways at the same time, and that is going to put stress on your resources. So you have to fiscally plan for possible consultants or other people that you can hire to help you run the one runway while you get the other one up and running. And you're gonna have to think of it thoroughly because it, you know, finances are a big thing. But then you've got to figure out what's the point you're going to change. And for us, again, the example we've brought out, we have been charging for our annual meeting on demand, uh, even this year, as we switched over to Evermed. We still did it that way. But next year, what happens? We are going to sell it as at the annual meeting of not the annual meeting on demand, but now we're going to be selling the subscription. Hey, come here, get a discount on the subscription for this last year's and the year before uh advance and our practice meeting, and you can get last year's collection as well when you get into the subscription. It almost starts to sell itself. When somebody's going and getting 2020 for us, 29, when they go to do it then, and they can go back and say, well, since 2025, four five, you've got four years of content that I'm able to purchase on top of that. It's in the collections. So eventually it will pay for itself. You just gotta not be fearful and have a plan for your finances. Those are the two biggest things I hear and see from everybody.

SPEAKER_00 48:35

Yeah, yeah, 100%. And we often say, I mean, something that's new like this, it also has to reach net neutral ideally in year one ideal, and more than that, because at the end of the day, then it becomes investment, not the cost center. Because if it's a cost center, something has gone wrong. And uh I think that's very important.

SPEAKER_01 48:51

Yeah, explaining it to your board, I'll leave you with this explaining all of this process to your board because or those who are in charge of finances, so they could see the need for an investment. Everything needs an investment. There needs to be seed money to get these things going. So it may be that investment is hey, listen, we we might take a loss in this year for our revenue, but we're going to do better than we did the year before and even after, as our projections are going to go higher and higher once we make this shift into the new modality.

SPEAKER_00 49:20

Yeah, yeah, 100%. I remember your CFO is also part of the conversation as a forecast and everything. For sure, for sure. Great. Um, this has been a wonderful conversation, as I said, it can go uh much longer than this, but uh it was wonderful. And thank you for sharing the experience as is because I think it's important for people who are thinking of how to modernize education to also feel more comfortable knowing that others have done it and be able to ask questions, and because everyone kind of talks to everyone in the association space, which is a beautiful thing, kind of not less competing, they're more collaborating. Um, right. So uh thank you, Viz, and we'll stay for for a couple more minutes to make sure everything gets uploaded and everything. And uh it was a real pleasure.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

Thank you, Bosey, and and anytime I can help. Look forward to meeting and talking with you in the future.