USCAP 2010 - Washington, D.C. - People Love Truffles

I just returned from the USCAP Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C. (United States and Canadian Academy of Pathology). It was attended by approximately 4,191 people involved in some aspect of the field of pathology.

I was part of a team of four conducting a research study involving 22 pathology residents, fellow and experts and a marketing effort to share information about SlideTutor, a computerized tutoring system for pathologists under development in the Department of Biomedical Informatics. Dr. Rebecca Crowley serves as the Principal Investigator on the project. The system uses virtual slides and computerized tutoring tools to teach residents, fellows and attending pathologists visual identification of conditions and diseases.

Probably the biggest lesson I learned in the five days I spent in D.C. is that the only way to really make a project successful is to work it. Effort must be put forth. Thought must be invested. Energy must be expended. Adjustments must be continuously made to improve results.

As I gazed down our aisle at the EXPO, I saw many booths staffed by people who were sitting down and working on their computers or PDAs. Whether there was one person in our aisle or twenty, they did not alter their behaviors or work hard to engage attendees.

I spent almost 7 hours standing at the front of our booth each day for three days straight. I kept a perpetual smile on my face and said "Good Morning!" or "Good Afternoon" to as many people as possible. I engaged visitors and drew them into our booth for discussion and demonstration of our system. My marketing partner was the computer programmer on the SlideTutor project. He was able to continue the conversation or demo the system while I turned around and engaged more visitors.

Now, I must stop here and give credit where credit is due! Dr. Crowley suggested that our promotional item consist of very fine chocolates. She said it was a big draw for her at conferences. Based on this input, I chose Lindt Lindor Milk and Dark Chocolate Truffles which I placed in a white basket with colorful green tissue paper to draw attention. I also printed out two very large images of truffles to place in our booth and included, "Enjoy A Truffle" on our large sign outside the booth.

This combination did create a real draw! We immediately began a tally to keep fairly accurate count of the number of people who simply took truffles with no interaction regarding our computer system and the number who we were able to actively engage in conversations regarding the system.

Truffle count could not be used to tally the number of visitors since some showed great restraint and did not take a truffle, while other visitors took, literally, handfuls of truffles.

In our final count, we had over 394 visitors to our booth and actively engaged over 150 of those visitors in SlideTutor conversations and demonstrations.

Informatics Project - Success!