The American College of Cardiology was in the final stages of preparing for its annual congress in Chicago when the coronavirus pandemic laid waste to their plans. With just 15 days until the show was due to open, they decided to shift the entire event online. Janice Sibley, ACC Executive Vice President of Education and Publishing, explains how:

Save the date

“We decided to keep the original date, because we felt that gave us the best chance of engaging our intended audience because they had already set aside this time off and were ready to go. But more importantly we were in the middle of a growing pandemic. COVID-19 was really beginning to hit hard, and we could sense the need for the healthcare community to come together, to band together as a group, so that’s why we felt it was important to save the date.

Initial thoughts

We tried very hard to keep our physical meeting in tact but realised it wasn’t going to be possible, but once we had made that decision, put our stake in the ground, in all truthfulness it wasn’t challenging in terms of the size of the event, but how are we going to engage our audience?

When you are together, physically, it is very easy to engage each other, you can network, see people face to face, but virtually it’s very hard to create that same sort of buzz. How do you recreate honorific events? Welcoming new members? Installing a new president? That’s was our difficulty.