An educational roadshow involves hosting a series of regional medical meetings with the same format, speakers, and agenda in order to disseminate a brand's key messages locally. While more expensive than a single national meeting, roadshows allow more delegates to attend conveniently and increase a brand's advocacy base across the country. To make a roadshow excellent, organizers should involve local speakers as chairs, recruit delegates with local field force help, distribute meeting reports, and keep faculty spirits up through the exhaustive process.

1. Let’s Get This Show on the Road!
What is an educational roadshow?
An educational roadshow is a series of regional medical educational meetings, each
with the same format, speaker faculty and agenda.
Why hold an educational roadshow?
While the costs involved in running an educational
roadshow will obviously be higher than holding one
national meeting, the benefits of being able to
disseminate your brand’s key messages at a local level
will outweigh this.
There are a number of benefits to holding a number of
meetings at a local level, as opposed to one large
national meeting:
1. Having many smaller meetings rather than one big one will give the meetings more
of an intimate feeling, and allow delegates to feel more involved in the meetings
2. By holding the meeting locally, delegates will understand that this is a local issue,
relevant to their region
3. Certain aspects of the meeting can be adapted to reflect local concerns and issues
4. Taking the meeting to the delegates, rather than the other way round, makes it more
convenient for delegates to attend, and also allows a potentially huge increase in
your brand’s advocacy base across the country
5. By reaching more advocates across the country, you will not only disseminate your
brand’s key messages locally, but also establish you as provider of topical and high
quality educational meetings
Making a good roadshow excellent
As with any meeting, there will be a number of logistical issues,
such as venue size and location, faculty members and meeting
content to consider. However, due to the regional and multiple-
meeting format of a roadshow, there are a few additional points
which, if considered in advance, can turn a good meeting into an
excellent one.
1. Faculty members: With a regional meeting, it is ideal if your speakers have local
kudos as well as being national leaders in their field. With an educational roadshow,
this can present a problem in that each meeting of the roadshow will have a different
local audience, and therefore will ideally require a different local speaker. As

2. mentioned above, the idea of an educational roadshow is to have the same agenda,
with the same travelling faculty presenting at each meeting. A compromise is to have
a fixed faculty that travel to each meeting, and a different local key opinion leader to
chair each meeting.
2. Delegate recruitment: Having a local chair help recruitment from their local hospital
or trust. Additionally, involving the local field force in this process will not only benefit
the meeting by capitalising on their local knowledge, but will also allow them to feel
more involved in the project.
3. Longevity: As with any successful meeting, there are a number of outputs that can
extend the life of the roadshow. A meeting report from one of the meetings can be
produced and distributed to attending delegates, as well as by the field force to those
who were unable to attend. The roadshow can become an annual event, visiting
different cities each year in order to extend the reach even further.
4. Keeping spirits up: Roadshows can be exhausting! And if you are feeling out of
energy, so will your faculty members. Don’t forget, they will also most likely have
fulltime jobs to handle on top of your roadshow, so be patient, be gracious and most
of all stay enthusiastic!