THANK YOU FOR SHARING...WE ARE LISTENING!

I have a confession to make. I am not really a survey person. Political poll results have never and probably never will include my opinion. My lack of cooperation with completing surveys includes department stores, sandwich shops, hotels, airlines, and new products. Occasionally I am tempted to put aside my resolve that my opinion is not really all that important to the world and I give in to the process of sharing my impression of the product or service. Then about half way through the survey there is a question regarding the issue that motivated me to start the survey in the first place; however, to my eternal frustration there is no answer consistent with my opinion. A few may be close, but not close enough! So rather than give an answer that does not truly reflect my opinion, I do not complete the survey and remind myself why I should not have started the survey in the first place. There are only a few exceptions to my no survey policy and that includes professional organizations that I truly value, which includes our Academy.

Your Academy staff, annual meeting volunteer leaders, and board of directors spent a great deal of time reviewing the results of the post-meeting survey from the recent Academy Meeting in Phoenix. More than 38% of meeting attendees completed the survey. Based on your responses, the Academy staff and volunteers are considering what corrective action or program enhancements might be enacted to improve our annual meeting. In addition, each and every response to the open ended questions and comment sections were reviewed.

We heard you loud and clear that while you are willing to provide us with course evaluations to improve and maintain the quality of our course offerings at future meetings, you do NOT want the course evaluations to be required. While evaluations are critical for ongoing improvement, they will no longer be made mandatory. The exhibit hall lunch program will be improved to serve the growing number of attendees at the meeting. Consideration to slightly alter the exhibit hall hours to allow more interaction between our attendees and our exhibitors is underway. You reminded us that as our Plenary Session has grown, there is a clear need for more screens positioned so that everyone can comfortably see the slides during the presentation.

There were many other helpful comments that we will take to heart as we continuously strive to improve the quality of our annual meeting and the service we provide to our Fellowship and the profession. My favorite response to the reason for attending the meeting was “desire to support the Academy.”

Thank you for taking the time to provide us with your valued input. Furthermore, I would like to encourage those who adopted my usual non-survey participatory strategy to please let us know what you are thinking—positive reinforcement or valued suggestions for improvement are welcome here.

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