When it comes to engagement goals, advisory board meetings are different from other types of life sciences meetings. Sponsors aren’t trying to train or educate advisors, but rather to benefit from their knowledge and opinions to help shape drug development, marketing campaigns, and other strategic initiatives. The best engagement features for an advisory board meeting help promote discussion and gather insights that can be included in the meeting report.
There are several ways to improve engagement at an advisory board meeting and encourage discussion instead of interrupting it. These range from presenting thought-provoking content on managed iPads® to tailoring engagement features to the meeting’s objectives.
The following are just three ways to seamlessly improve engagement at advisory board meetings:
- Send a survey prior to the meeting (also referred to as an asynchronous survey) to learn which of the planned topics is most interesting to your advisors before creating your schedule for the day. People naturally have more to say if they are interested in a topic, so letting the attendees’ interests guide your agenda can lead to more effective discussions.
- Deploy open-ended Q&A as you are about to move to each new topic in the agenda. This is a brief but effective way to capture each person’s final thoughts and opinions on what was discussed. By using a poll within the meeting platform, answers are documented and saved as part of the meeting’s data. This record is particularly useful for compliance reporting, as tracking the engagement of advisors ensures sponsors have what they need when tracking against contractual commitments.
- Add a “Slide Feedback" button to allow advisors to comment off-mic and in real-time on each presented slide or topic as the meeting proceeds. Even in the comfort of a confidential advisory board environment, some people may have thoughts they don’t want to bring to the discussion, but which they are comfortable sharing in a confidential slide note. Enabling this type of simple feedback may gather insights you wouldn’t receive otherwise, and this is also included in the overall meeting data.
WCG Array has experience working with clients to deliver efficient and effective advisory board meetings. Strategic deployment of engagement features helps drive discussion while collecting data in the platform, where you’ll be able to use it to combine data-backed insights with anecdotal impressions gathered in the moment. Learn more about how we helped a client change course based on feedback gained during an advisory board meeting.
