meeting management:

medical Elise Oberliesen

Long-Term Practice Khalsa (left, as a child) was brought up on yoga, whose physical and mental benefits physicians experience at Mountain Pose (right).

locale for the inaugural Mountain Pose Medicine and Yoga Symposium, held in August 2011, but also its partner. The Copper Mountain Resort Association (CMRA), which serves as the local chamber of commerce, marketed the conference with a public-relations campaign, as well as a targeted direct- mail and email campaign to health-care provider mailing lists it purchased, said Erin Woods, CMRA’s marketing manager. “We also promoted [the sym- posium] through social media, some industry-relevant print publications, and sent emails through specific health- care companies with which we have relationships,” she said. Khalsa supplemented CMRA’s

46 PCMA CONVENE JANUARY 2013

marketing initiative with her own word- of-mouth marketing efforts — which included her husband, Joe Alcock, M.D., an ER chief at Albuquerque’s Raymond G. Murphy VA Medical Center, who spread the word via staff meetings. Beyond marketing support, CMRA

helped fund the symposium by pick- ing up all of the faculty per-diem and speaking fees — speakers included medical researchers and profession- als, yogis, musicians, and motivational speakers — as well as their travel and lodging expenses. Woods said that CMRA wanted to

“experiment” by co-creating an event to offer the medical establishment. The inaugural event — and the second

annual Mountain Pose Medicine and Yoga Symposium, held Aug. 22–26, 2012, which CMRA also underwrote — helped stimulate business for CMRA’s lodging members, Woods said. Showcasing the destination, Woods hoped, also would entice physicians to vacation there and to recommend it as a future venue host for organizations they belong to or boards they sit on.

SERIOUS ABOUT CME The first symposium — which had something of a yoga-festival vibe, fea- turing celebrity yoga personalities like Rodney Yee — attracted some 300 reg- istrants. The second one drew signifi- cantly fewer attendees — approximately

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