August 6, 2024 •Array Team
While it used to be chic to provide attendees with a branded pen and notepad, these weren’t very effective at aiding recall of the meeting’s messages if they were left behind in hotel rooms or lost soon after returning home. Today, the ability to take notes electronically provides attendees with a way to create a more durable, personalized portfolio of relevant information to refer to later. In fact, just the process of taking notes helps reinforce retention of key content. What’s more, Array’s annotation feature offers as much benefit to the meeting organizer as to the attendee. Our Participant Notes Report provides meeting sponsors a unique opportunity to understand how attendees engaged with the content, what they thought about it, which of it resonated best, and even if there was confusion or dissent around a particular topic.
Proven ROE value
Taking notes plays an essential role in the processing and maintenance of information. There is a 34 percent chance key information will be remembered if it’s included in notes. However, there is only a five percent chance the key information will be remembered if it’s not in the notes.1
There are cases where sponsors don’t want to encourage or allow attendees to take notes because they are protecting proprietary information. A study on digital note taking, conducted on students in a medical education setting, looked at students’ best practices for taking notes on an iPad. The study found there is educational value in the action of taking notes, separate from how those notes are used or referred to later. It stated, “While taking notes, students processed the new information in an accomplished way and personalized the digital learning materials by making comments, underlining, marking images and drawing. The visual nature of their learning materials stimulated learning.”
Array’s platform has options for attendees to take notes directly on content slides either via typing or using the stylus. This means they can type notes to themselves, such as “share this with the team,” as well as circle or draw arrows pointing to the specific element of the slide they want to focus on. As the digital note taking study found, this provides a best practice approach to helping attendees both process and personalize the content. To protect proprietary information, there is the option of prompting attendees with a “Provide feedback” button instead of “Take notes.” This encourages people to share their comments on the content without the promise of receiving slides later. Regardless of the prompt used, stylus and typed notes from each attendee are captured to provide valuable insights to meeting organizers.
Key insights only available in attendees’ notes
Array provides a Participant Notes Report to give clients valuable insight into how attendees directly interacted with the content. Seeing annotations in relation to specific content provides a unique perspective on what attendees were thinking when it was being presented. Imagine being able to ask your attendees, “Do you agree with this?” or “Is this important to you?” or even, “What information on this slide do you want more information about?” for each and every slide. To do this in real-time would make for a very long (and very boring) meeting. The report essentially answers these questions without interrupting the meeting flow.
The report provides data for each attendee who saved a slide or took a note, including their email address, unique registration ID, and actions such as total number of times they used the save a slide, take a note (or provide feedback), or stylus notes feature. Clients can then dig deeper and choose to look specifically at the attendee’s saved notes, including in the context of the slides on which they were made. Seeing what was circled or pointed to and what questions or comments someone wrote clearly identifies what captured their attention and, likely, what they thought about it. While it’s true that not everyone takes a note – or doesn’t take a note on every slide – what they choose to react to tells a story you can’t get otherwise.
Insights for every meeting type
The detail contained within the notes report can yield valuable insights for several life science meeting types. For example:
A review of notes from an investigator meeting can ensure sites and monitoring teams are fully familiar with the study protocol, logistics and other critical elements. This results in efficient operation of a study overall and reduced data queries for faster database close out and trial reports.
In ad boards, reviewing notes allows for focused recommendations for future planning. Regional differences may be observed by analysis of consistent notes content. Practice patterns may be identified via analysis broken down by specialty, years in practice or practice setting.
Speaker training also can benefit from a review of the notes by identifying any areas for improvement on the approved slide deck before roll-out, such as the need to clarify the content. Seeing speakers’ notes also helps identify any future support they may need (individually or on aggregate) and ensures they are fully prepared for program roll-out.
No matter the meeting type, additional insights can be gained by looking at the attendees’ notes as a group. For example, seeing that many participants had similar comments or questions around the same piece of content helps strategically plan next steps. If there are very few notes taken on around any content, that could be a warning sign that it either wasn’t interesting or understood. Sometimes, a sponsor may realize they need to reach out to correct misinformation around a slide, or perhaps there is an opportunity to develop more outreach around a topic that many people seemed to be particularly interested in learning or talking more about.
As studies have concluded, the act of taking notes is effective at helping retain and recall knowledge. When permitted to send the notes to themselves following the meeting, these curated portfolios of information will help them share training and insights with the team and recall key information. For the sponsor, enabling note taking is to create the opportunity for another audience engagement process that yields valuable insights.