Pre-Planning: The Secret to Successful Events

After an idea for an event has been selected:

1. State the event's goal
2. Clarify the event's target audience
3. Create an event outline, including the program's content
4. Select a date and time
5. List supplies needed
6. Make a budget and fundraising plan
7. Contact potential speakers
8. Select a site and make necessary reservations
9. Create a timeline or event calendar

 Pre-planning also includes:

• Putting together an event organizing team and delegating responsibility
• Effective advertising
• Selecting a moderator or event coordinator
• Doing a program evaluation
• Thinking about follow-up activities
• Thinking about how an event fits into larger FMIG goals
• Paying attention to details, including making sure to send thank-you letters

Pre-planning can be done by one person or by a small group. Pre-planning allows many ideas to be incorporated into a project, makes it easier to delegate responsibilities, and expands a basic goal into a meaningful program. Pre-planning also gives an event focus.

Programming Ideas

Educating Students About Family Medicine

• Invite the president of your AAFP constituent chapter to speak
• Encourage involvement in National Primary Care Day activities
• Have a family physician as keynote speaker
• Schedule lunchtime talks with family medicine residents or community family physicians
• Create fliers listing family medicine facts
• Develop mentoring and shadowing programs
• Advocate for required family medicine clerkships and rotations
• Host a forum on areas of certificates of added qualification in family medicine (geriatrics and sports medicine)
• Advocate to have family physicians teach aspects of the core curriculum in the 1st and 2nd years
• Host hands-on activities, including skills workshops and procedural courses
• Hold activities in and take students to visit different practice settings
• Create an informational bulletin board
• Host talks on research in primary care and arrange for summer experiences
• Hold a forum/panel of family physicians from a variety of backgrounds and practices to acquaint students with the breadth of family medicine

Check out the current PoE Award Recipients, current PoE Categorical Award Winners and past PoE Award Recipients for further programming ideas. These schools were recognized for their exemplary efforts in infrastructure, student involvement/ retention, family medicine advocacy and community outreach/patient advocacy.

Recruiting New Members

Recruiting new members is the key to ensuring that your club will continue into the future and is a way to decrease the workload for everyone involved. Here are some helpful suggestions for recruiting members:

• Collect donations from businesses and conduct raffles during orientation week to attract students to your booth.
• Hold social mixers (football games, cooking fiascoes, ice cream socials)
• Coordinate a breakfast for new students and invite local family physicians to attend and meet the students
• Advertise receiving the journal, American Family Physician as an incentive to join the AAFP
• Set up a table at the activities fair (have articles on family medicine, membership materials, journals, calendar of events, and food at the table)
• Create promotional materials (physical exam outline cards with FMIG name and logo)
• Run procedural workshops (casting, suturing, injections)
• Stage a medical Jeopardy tournament
• Schedule a residency application workshop
• Schedule a residency interviewing workshop
• Hold an academic orientation by members of the FMIG (for example, to share old exams, to make textbook suggestions)
• Develop a shadow program for first years (24 hours with a family medicine resident)
• Promote events with broad appeal topics, such as sports medicine, which are good for recruitment
• Develop a packet for student mailboxes
• Make individual phone calls to first-year students
• Have door prizes at events
• Schedule physical exam sessions (fourth-year students teaching first- and second-year students)
• Set up a task force with students from each year for brainstorming, i.e., programs that would appeal to their year

Programming for 3rd and 4th Year Students

• Hold mock interviews
• Have a residency fair
• Offer Strolling Through the Match (an AAFP program along with an excellent workbook)
• Stage a panel discussion with residents
• Schedule a debt management workshop
• Hold skills workshops (EKG, stress testing and colposcopy)
• Provide information on electives in family medicine
• Develop a mentoring program
• Set up practice management sessions
• Have workshops on death and dying/sharing difficult news
• Offer an Advanced Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) course
• Schedule a Board preparation course on "How to Prepare for Boards Part II" session
• Have fourth-year students talk to third-year students about the Match at a post-Match party; fourth-year students can donate their residency notes and brochures to other students
• Provide sessions on “How to Choose a Residency”
• Provide sessions on “Using Computer Resources”
• Develop a longitudinal elective focused on family medicine topics
• Discuss managed care and health care reform
• Provide "Managing a Family and Family Medicine"
• Provide copies of the Directory of Family Medicine Residency Programs
• Publish monthly newsletters
• Hold panel discussions for students that are geared toward relevant topics such as the Match and surviving residency
• Hold meetings in the evenings
• Sponsor mock interviews for students
• Coordinate procedural workshops such as flexible sigmoidoscopy and skin biopsy
• Organize community service projects for fourth-years

Creating an Expanded Role for the FMIG

• Have your FMIG send representatives to other organizations
• Participate in student government
• Hold community health fairs
• Arrange for and/or advertise summer electives in primary care
• Expand programming to more than just lunchtime events
• Create a newsletter, e-mail network, clinical pearls paper
• Invite the dean to speak at an FMIG meeting
• Organize shadowing programs
• Work with undergraduate/premedical students
• Attend state, regional and national meetings
• Create/advertise volunteer opportunities
• Provide exposure to mentors
• Pair first- and second-year students with third- and fourth- year students committed to family medicine
• Recruit students to volunteer at a community free-health clinic