Are You Using Best Practices for Your Peer Review? Hmmm?

Peer review is one of the most difficult parts of the whole conference management process, yet it is vital to the success of a conference. From recruiting experts as reviewers, and informing them of what is expected, to ensuring that reviewers adhere to strict deadlines, peer review management is a full-time job in and of itself. Applying best practices to your peer review process will put your association on the path to success and give your organization the confidence that member attendees will be receiving the best educational experience.

So, are you using best practices for your peer review? Learn about best practices in this addition of The Advisor newsletter. Not signed up? No problem, just click here to access our newsletter signup form.

Look for our newsletter next Tuesday, December 7th in your Inbox!

Introducing...the Event Archives Site!

We are proud to announce that the new Event Archives site is now live! You can access our new site at the following link: www.eventarchives.com.

This site provides information on our new content distribution service. Event Archives is a new OASIS content distribution service that provides access to rich media presentations from meetings and conferences. It follows the capture - archive - distribute process, and offers the opportunity to learn without stepping foot in a convention center.

If you are interested in obtaining meeting-related content or even in preserving your content through our capture - archive - distribute process, you can contact us using the Contact Us form on this site.

Q3 2010 Webinar - SignUp Is Only Open for a Few More Days!

Signup for our Q3 webinar on data collection is closing next Wednesday! You don't want to miss out on this one: http://bit.ly/q32010webtwiann

Didn't receive our webinar sign-up info this AM? You can sign-up for the webinar here:http://bit.ly/oasisml

Get on the OASIS mailing list so you don't miss any future communications here:http://bit.ly/oasisml

To whet your appetite for this webinar, here's information: :)

By collecting and analyzing complex meeting data with an easy-to-use reporting tool, complex data transforms into sophisticated, meaningful reports. Please join us at our complimentary webinar where we will be launching the new OASIS Report tool as well as the new ITE (Instruction Text Editor tool! At our webinar, you can learn how to achieve the following with your meeting data:

• Decrease the service cost of obtaining data to make good business decisions
• Stay ahead of association and member challenges through observing trends in data that is available to you today
• Save time and money by delivering your report data in a variety of formats
• Drive speakers and reviewers to complete their essential activities and ensure timely communication
• View the reports that enable you to increase the quality of attendee education by observing real attendee performance

A demonstration of the new OASIS Report will also be presented during the webinar, so be sure to tune-in to get a preview of this powerful new tool.

Take advantage of this opportunity to learn more about collecting and analyzing meeting data by clicking here to register for our complimentary webinar, "Best Practice Meeting Analytics that Drive the Best Communication, Education & Efficiency" held on Wednesday, September 22nd at 2:00 EDT/ 1:00 CDT. In addition, our recently released Q3 newsletter highlights the topic of collecting and analyzing meeting data, and you can read this edition by clicking here.

Our hope is that you will join us for this webinar - the third in our quarterly installment of the OASIS Technology Leadership Series.

Regards,

The OASIS Team

Learn how to Increase Member Engagement through Actionable Metrics, and More! Q3 Edition of The OASIS Advisor - It's Here!

The Q3 edition of The OASIS Advisor newsletter, distributed on August 25th, is now available! Titled "Best Practice Meeting Analytics," this edition focuses on how to simplify complex event data to better understand event performance by having the proper reporting and analytic tools. This edition offers a sneak-peek of the new OASIS reporting tool. You don't want to miss reading this edition of The OASIS Advisor!

Click here to access the HTML-version of the newsletter. Thank you for your interest and your readership!

OASIS Advisor Newsletter, Q3 Edition - Right Around the Corner!

The Q3 edition of the OASIS Advisor newsletter will be distributed on Tuesday, August 24th!

In this edition, we'll focus on the new updated reporting tool, which offers meeting analytics that help to drive communication, education and efficiency for our associations. You'll hear from the president of our company, the head of product development, as well as the OASIS product manager. We'll also be offering another tip/trick to use with our product.

Have you signed-up yet to receive your copy? If you haven't, you can do so at this link.

Associations Helping Gulf Oil Spill Victims Overcome Tragedy

I found this awesome article describing how some nonprofits/associations are helping Gulf oil spill victims http://bit.ly/9M0g91. Read it and be inspired about how you can help that community!

Practice what you preach!

In our second quarter, 2010 webinar, we highlight the virtues of capturing your at-meeting content in a quality fashion which will optimize your ability to reuse it later. This is not rocket science, but it's amazing how many folks haven't even heard of "elemental capture!" Did you know that if you don't do this, you will spend 2, 3, ... 10x the cost later to convert your captured media to different formats as new devices arrive to the market (think of the recent launch of the iPad!).

In an effort to help build awareness of how to do capture "right" in the association market, you may find our webinar of value. Watch it here... and comment to this post to let us know what you think!

http://bit.ly/b9L1U1

New Meeting Features On the Horizon - Mobile Device Users, These Are For You!

As a meeting attendee in the 21st century, I'm sure you manage much of your life on the mobile device of your choice (PDA, Blackberry, iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle, Nook ... the list goes on and on). Wouldn't it be convenient if the next meeting you attendee could accommodate some of these mobile features that you use daily and love?

Just think, at your next meeting you may be able to:

• Search a general meeting program on your mobile device vs. on a bulky paper program
• Manage your personal meeting itinerary when you want to and where you want to
• Search and access full abstract text
• Watch captured presentation audio, video and poster presentations
• Locate what presentations are near you in the next X hours
• Find other presentations by the same author
• Interact socially with fellow attendees

Do all this, AND MORE, on your mobile device. And with so many abstract management providers and meeting planners focusing on accommodating these capabilities, you just may be able to coast through the next meeting you attend, mobile device in hand!

Poll: which format do you prefer - watching presentational content with audio + video or reading abstracts + text? meetings asae pcma

Captured content can earn your association non-dues revenue. Signup now for our complimentary webinar! http://bit.ly/Q2webinarsignup

Q2, 2010 of The Advisor - Now Available!

It has taken a village, but the Q2, 2010 edition of The Advisor is now available!

You can view it on the OASIS Marketing site.

As always, thank you for your readership and interest.

OASIS Tip & Trick: Demographics Report

This quarter's issue has an OASIS tip that helps you with determining the geographical distribution of control records by activity type as they are created or submitted within OASIS. This is especially helpful for an open-call submission of abstracts, as this report offers a snap shot of where submissions are coming from as a submission deadline grows closer.

Follow these simple steps to generate this report:

1.Within the OASIS Admin site, select the Demographics menu option located within the Submission menu. Please note that this option can also be accessed through the Reports menu.

Note: If you are using the original OASIS Admin menus, this menu option will be located within the Reports menu.

2.On the Demographics page, select control status options and a display option to apply to your report. The “Complete” and “Displaying non-Zero Locations” options are selected by default. Although a control status option is not required to run your demographics report, a display option is required.

3.Once you have determined the options that you would like applied to your report, select the “Show Report” button.

The grid located below the control status options is the demographics report. Within this report, the control record distribution may change depending on which status option(s) and display option was selected. Please note that this report displays the control record distribution by both country and by U.S. state.

This Just In - You Can Now Find Us on Facebook and LinkedIn!

It's here! You can now keep in touch with OASIS through our LinkedIn group and Facebook fan page! Check us out:


Our Facebook Fan Page



Our LinkedIn group


As big believers in the importance of social media, we are excited to announce that the OASIS Facebook fan page and LinkedIn group are now live and well! We will be using these accounts to distribute OASIS news about major product releases in real-time (yes, as they happen!). We will also be sharing nuggets of knowledge about abstracts management and the association industry.

We hope you will become active users of both the fan page and the group, as we are very interested in what you have to say! Feel free to share your knowledge, ask questions, share your OASIS experience, etc. - we want to start active conversations with you! Our mission is to keep you informed with OASIS happenings, and of course we hope to learn as much as we can from you.

Become a group member, become a fan or better yet, BOTH! Once you connect to us, you will receive all of our group updates through an RSS feed (yes, everything will come straight to your email - it's easy!).

We hope to hear from you soon on Facebook or on LinkedIn!

Ekatius: Extending the Reach of Your Meeting Content!

Preserving meeting content has never been more important than now. Medical research is dying a quick death post-meeting when it could assist with ground-breaking research and ongoing education long after the meeting. Previously, there has been no unified database or resource available to access legacy event knowledge, making presentations, papers and abstracts difficult and time-consuming to locate for association members and impossible for end-users. The only way an end-user could find archived material would be either through their membership with an association that digitally captures and archives its personal meeting presentations, or by stumbling upon it. Considering that the average four day conference contains nearly ten times that time-frame’s presentation material, a serious amount of education risks being lost. This poses a serious distribution and discoverability problem for associations looking to expand the exposure of their science.

Ultimately, the indexing of event knowledge in appropriate search engines is a decision left to the owners of the content, namely the sponsoring association. But when done, it enables the scientific, medical and technical (STM) communities to access previously unknown information from multiple associations where and when they need it. In 2005, the American Heart Association (AHA) needed a tool that would, among other things, make their Scientific Session event available on the Internet. By utilizing the components of the Content Discovery Suite (primarily, Ekatius™), the scientific content from their event was placed in a permanent, searchable repository with other STM content and as a result exists and is readily accessible today. Within their first year, this meeting’s content yielded hundreds of page views, and thousands of page views have been tracked since. Even though that meeting was five years ago, the content lives on today.

Ekatius™ is an event knowledge dissemination platform that aggregates and disseminates event knowledge elements such as abstracts, posters, and rich media presentations. It provides a permanent content library giving science presented at meetings a longer, potentially indefinite shelf life. The Ekatius™ platform has advanced search functionalities that allow users to search for event knowledge elements either within a specific event or across several events, thus yielding a cross-disciplinary view of the latest knowledge on a given topic. Social networking capabilities, such as social bookmarking, are also available with Ekatius™, which allow users to bookmark and share their bookmarks with others on popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg or Del.icio.us, increasing collaboration and knowledge sharing within and outside the association. These components give associations the ability to maximize the exposure and impact of their meeting content to an audience beyond the physical confines of a given meeting.

A bridge can be created from meeting content in its syndicated form on Ekatius™ to the per-access or subscription-based Archive site, allowing content to reach a wider audience. This provides an opportunity to collect non-dues revenue and drive membership on otherwise dated content, ultimately increasing an association’s bottom line. By capturing and disseminating their event knowledge, associations get far more mileage out of their conference programming—and subtly promote those conferences by giving web browsers a taste of what they have missed. Content today translates into new profit and members tomorrow.

Ekatius™ can help to increase your meeting’s exposure by disseminating your association’s event knowledge to a global audience. By integrating with the OASIS Content Discovery Suite – Archive, Capture, and To-Go – Ekatius™ can create a path for future customers, members, and partners to find their way directly to your meeting content, and indirectly to you as the sponsoring association. Meeting content remains accessible and relevant long into the future allowing your association to extend its meeting content’s reach further than ever, creating the best opportunities for science.

Oh! The Places Your Content Will Go!

“Even as webcasts and virtual meetings become more user friendly, your members
are never going to stop wanting to get together in person to learn, network,
and
build relationships. As I always say, there's no such thing as a virtual
beer.”

- Corbin Ball

It is true that meetings, and attending them in person, are here to stay. Corbin Ball may have said it best with the simple reference to a beer. You simply can't share a beer on the web, no matter how real it might look on the screen or the latest iPhone app.

Nonetheless, there are ample reasons for ensuring that your content is poised and ready to exist and be widely distributed long after your meeting. Or perhaps even during your meeting.

Captured content has merits for all attendees, not just the ones who couldn't afford to or make time for travel. It is physically impossible to attend all sessions at any meeting with concurrent sessions, thus attendees aren’t exposed to all the content of a meeting regardless of whether they are there in person or not. A recent medical meeting which was held over the course of four days had a total duration, for the oral presentations presented at the meeting, of over 816 hours, or 34 days, worth of content.

An extremely important difference between a live meeting and an archived one is that the live meeting is a place of dynamic learning among peers, while the virtual meeting or archive is a place of static learning for an individual. This means that it is imperative your captured content is created in a format which can flow into the widest array of devices and playback methods possible. You simply have to cater to the personal preferences and needs of the individual when you are trying to foster static learning with a successful outcome. People want to use the tool, device, and media format that they are the most comfortable with.

Consumer devices range from computers to iPads to smart phones. Some devices, especially those by Apple, are limited to very specific video and media types that will function correctly for playback. Simply getting content into formats that will work well on these devices is a job by itself, let alone capturing it in the first place. If you want to scare yourself with technical considerations for a device, check out this page for example.

With Capture by OASIS, you can be assured that your content will be natively captured in a format that is ready for conversion to all of the specific devices and formats that you'd like to offer to your attendees. With OASIS Digital Media, eBooks may be created that will look and behave correctly whether your attendees' eReaders are Kindles or Nooks. It's not a simple piece of technology by any stretch, but OASIS is committed to offering your content on the widest array of consumer devices possible. Put simply, OASIS believes that this is necessary for self-learning and remote content usage.

Well archived content holds almost infinite value. Archiving allows international members that can not attend an event to still be exposed to, and benefit from, all the knowledge presented at a given meeting.

Providing year-round, global access to event knowledge represents a powerful means of experience marketing for an association, which helps create or increase brand awareness and loyalty.

By capturing and disseminating their event knowledge, associations get far more mileage out of their conference programming—and subtly promote those conferences by giving web viewers a taste of what they might have missed. It is not a stretch to say that your association's own "legacy" content can even serve as a recruiting vehicle for new membership if delivered correctly. When your content works this hard for you, it is easy to see why OASIS remains committed to allowing content to be discovered by as wide and vast of an audience as possible.

EBooks + the Association Industry

Last month, we hosted a free webinar titled "e-Books for the Association Industry." Led by our CEO, it focused on the advancement of e-Book technology and provided real-life examples of associations using e-books to deliver content to their meeting participants and association members. This webinar also offered strategies for associations on how to integrate e-books into their next meeting.

You can click the following link to watch a clip of the webinar:



If you'd like to view the full version, complete our sign-up form and we will send it to you shortly: http://cttoasis.wufoo.com/forms/webinar-signup-form/

This webinar is the first in our OASIS Technology Leadership Series. We'll be posting information about our upcoming free webinar on Wednesday, June 23rd, so stay tuned!

Pages Without Pages

It's a funny thing when you stop and realize how much something has changed that you took for granted. Recently I was at the ACC 59th Annual Scientific Sessions event in Atlanta. As I walked through the amazingly large conference halls, I kept noticing bins upon bins of printed program books, abstract books, and all kinds of handouts. Keep in mind that it was the last day of the conference, towards the end of the session events, and most of the bins I saw were very full. I picked up one of each book to see the quality of the production--ACC did a wonderful job of putting together a format that reads well and is very professionally done. Yet surplus in the bulky-print-book department must certainly be costing the organization some undue expense.

ACC is an association clever enough to consider alternatives to physical, printed media. In fact, they partnered with us this year for the 59th annual event to offer their program and abstract book in Kindle, iPhone, Nook, Reader, and other digital formats (http://cttoasis.wufoo.com/forms/acc10-i210/). The uptake of these formats, especially the iPhone version of their content, signifies a real shift in preference for how attendees want to access content. It's impossible to know (without quantitative testing) whether it is the cost/environmental concern or the simple convenience and portability of this type of content that is the primary motivator for "trying it", but it's clear that digital content consumption is on the rise for good reason. Fortunately, we're going to survey all willing participants in the digital content download group to see how to better cater to this progressive segment in the future! Data rules, and we want to hear the voice of our customer and their attendees loud and clear!

At OASIS, we've experienced a surge in demand for digital content offerings. PCMA's Convene approached us to do an article about our partnership with AHA and SfN with regard to e-Book creation. You can read it here http://bit.ly/bUAJI1 in the great article "Pages Without Pages". (Contrary to the one contextual error in the article, we're sure you know by now that OASIS is one of the original abstract management solutions with a history of over 15-years. Our Content Discovery Suite e-Book offering is what is new--the article references e-Books and OASIS interchangeably). We are optimistic that many associations realize the benefits of this important trend. It is a part of our core offering and we'll keep pushing ahead to create more opportunities in the digital content space.

The OASIS Advisor... Almost There!

We are using a new email campaign management service this quarter for the delivery of our quarterly email newsletter. Campaign Monitor has rave reviews for many e-publishers, so we figured we should see how their deliverability fares. We are excited to arrive in your inbox in the near future, and we've created an enhanced look & feel to coincide with the change in delivery services.

As always, the next issue of the newsletter will include eBook versions and links to our blog (well, you're here, so that's not news!) and our Twitter feed. Stay in touch, sign-up, and receive our latest posts. The goal of using these social media tools is to keep you aware of the latest offerings that OASIS has, as well as a glimpse into our outlook on meeting content management and related technology. It's an exciting place to be.

If you have any questions, comments, or feedback about our newsletter, we're just a click away. Should you wish to sign-up for the newsletter, you can feel free to visit our website at http://home.abstractsonline.com/news/the-oasis-advisor-2010-q1/.

In short, we are excited to keep improving the way we reach our customers. Thanks for reading.

Got Mobile?!

The demand for digital content accessibility has never been greater. When you think about catering to the many high tech professionals that your association serves in the STM space, it's imperative that you allow your attendees to access their entire meeting itinerary on any mobile device they’re already comfortable with—online or offline. iCalendar support enables direct-to-personal calendar imports for itinerary access from anywhere. iCalendar is a fascinating concept because it is not new. It was actually a specification developed several years ago that sets the standard for how to make many items of calendar-based content accessible as a single, portable file. Why don't more systems leverage this concept?! It seems like a no-brainer, so we ensured it got onto our roadmap here at OASIS.

It makes sense to let each user keep track of their own personal itinerary on the device or software that works best for them. Attendees with iPhones? No problem. Some find Google Calendar easier? Simple. OASIS iCalendar capability enables entire itineraries—not single sessions—to be imported directly into a user’s calendar device or application at once.

If this sounds as exciting to you as it does to us, please check out our newly released information sheet at http://home.abstractsonline.com/_transfer/OASIS_MobileItinerary.pdf