Pick me! Pick me!

Do you remember recess and lunch time on the playground of your elementary school? There were usually some organized games like kick ball, relay races, or four square, or heaven forbid, dodge ball. (Am I dating myself?) My teacher would, on a rotating basis, identify team captains from amongst the students. Then the captains would set about selecting their teams from their anxious classmates all huddled together. Of course the group didn’t stand idly by waiting to be picked. We all jumped up and down with our hands high in the air shouting ‘Pick me! Pick me!’ Hoping that jumping the highest and shouting the loudest would deem us the ‘best player’ and thus be picked first. Or at least not last.

Now, fast forward from the playground to my role and responsibilities with OTAC, one of which is to participate in and help guide continuing education offerings to the members and the profession, as well as to do the promotion. With so many options for the OT profession to earn continuing education, I sometimes feel like I am back on the playground trying to jump the highest and shout the loudest so that you will pick OTAC continuing education options.

Why should you pick OTAC first for your continuing education options? When you pick OTAC, you get a team on your side that you can hold in trust. Here’s why:

• Governance. OTAC is an association governed by a volunteer Board of Directors made up of occupational therapy professionals who are elected by their peers. These volunteers earn no remuneration for their service. They serve out of passion for the sustainability, progression, and integrity of the profession. They are the highest authority of the association and take their roles seriously; committees report to them.  
• Mission. OTAC’s governing body works to support OTAC’s mission – OTAC is the collective voice that serves, promotes, and supports the profession of occupational therapy and its practitioners.
• Core Value. OTAC’s core value number 5 – Professional Development to provide quality education and resources to advance the knowledge, skills, and continued competence of occupational therapy practitioners.
• Committee. OTAC has a standing committee, Professional Development and Leadership, that serves to provide support for continuing education for OTs and OTAs by assessing, identifying, and monitoring the profession’s needs for continuing education.
• OTAC U. The Professional Development and Leadership Committee brands its continuing education under OTAC U … inspiring your learning journey. They uphold that continuing education is not just about the mandatory units needed every two years. But that the profession should embrace the learning journey for a lifetime of exemplary service to its clients so that they may optimize their life experience. It also provides periodic presenting and instructing tools and tips for its presenters. The most recent was about the unique needs of teaching adults. OTAC highly values its continuing education presenters and works hard to ensure they are appreciated. We hope that you appreciate them as well.
• Peer Reviewed Courses. OTAC conducts a call for proposals for the Annual Conference and Spring Symposium to the entire profession in California and beyond. Submitted proposals are peer reviewed, preferably by up to three professionals with expertise in the appropriate area of practice. Courses must meet a minimum score to be considered with some borderline courses receiving mentoring for improvement. ALL presenters of selected courses receive the reviewers’ feedback for improvement.
• Evaluation. OTAC asks for evaluations on ALL of its sessions. These evaluations are tallied and along with the comments are shared with the presenters and the Professional Development and Leadership Committee.
• Topic/Presenter Recruitment and Selection. OTAC selects courses and presenters from the call for proposals submitted; feedback, requests, and recommendations received from the profession throughout the year; and the evaluations from Conference and Spring Symposium. The feedback on the evaluations is summarized and shared with the OTAC Board of Directors, committee chairs, Professional Development and Leadership Committee, and the Practice, Ethics, and Reimbursement Committee. Recommendations are gathered from these groups of OTAC leaders who have pledged to serve you.
• Supporting a Breadth of Interests. You might notice that some of our sessions may only have a handful of attendees. OTAC doesn’t just select sessions that are of highest demand, would draw the largest group. They work to ensure that as many different interests are served within the confines of our resources at our events, and sometimes that means a few sessions with a handful of attendees.
• Association Management Support. OTAC’s executive director (that’s me) has more than 20 years’ experience working with the professional development component of associations and is thus well versed in successful programming and implementation.
• Nonprofit. OTAC is a nonprofit organization that operates under California corporate law. Being a nonprofit doesn’t mean that we can’t make a profit. It means that that profit must inure to the benefit of the greater good of those we serve – the occupational therapy profession.

While I will continue to jump up and down and shout ‘pick me’ (OTAC continuing education), the next time you are considering a course, consider where you will most likely get the greatest value and highest quality in an environment dedicated to serve and support you.

I look forward to seeing you on the ‘playground’ at OTAC’s Annual Conference, Spring Symposium, and other events.

Getting the Information You Value Most

For the past decade or more, we have been hearing about ‘big data,’ which Wikipedia defines as ‘data sets that are so large or complex that traditional data processing application software is inadequate.’

Big data was recently re-defined for broader consumption in Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Kenneth Cukie as “The ability of society to harness information in novel ways to produce useful insights or goods and services of significant value.” This new definition is not limited by size, meaning that there can be useful information in small sets of data, such as in an association’s membership system.

From targeting to customization to personalization. The use of big data eventually morphed outside of the tech world and into the marketing community wherein they used to refer to using their data to ‘target’ potential audience. Then the marketing community upped its ‘value’ game by changing the reference of targeting to ‘customization.’ Now we are hearing targeting/customization has evolved into ‘personalization.’ A prime example of this new personalization is that when you are on the internet, ads will pop-up promoting a product you were researching the day before on the internet. Or, in Amazon, you might receive pop-up messaging that recommends products based on your past searches and/or purchases.  

OTAC, similarly to other organizations collecting customer and potential customer data, wants to ensure that the information and messaging we distribute gets into the hands of our audience (occupational therapy community) who are most interested in the information.

While our targeting / customization / personalization is certainly not on the scale of mega companies like Amazon and Walmart, we do our best with the resources at hand to give you ‘useful goods or services … of value.’

How OTAC personalizes our messaging. Mostly OTAC personalizes its messaging and outreach based on the data that members enter in their customer record when they join or renew, or register for an activity. We personalize our messaging in a variety of ways. For example:

• Region 2 (Los Angeles County) is hosting its annual Tea with a Scholar on November 12. We send an electronic alert to those individuals who are identified as residing in Region 2. (If an event is held close to the border of another region, we might distribute to that region as well.)
•  Associated with our Annual Conference, we send personalized messaging about the various practice tracks. For example, if your record indicates that your work setting is school-based or your practice area is pediatrics you would receive an electronic alert highlighting those related sessions, and so on for all the tracks.
• If we were advocating about a legislative bill related to hand therapy, we would send a personalized message to those in our customer system identified as working in hands or with a CHT credential about the bill.

Often we send electronic messages to our complete customer data set because while all the information may not be specifically personalized to you, we find that most of the OT community wants to know what is going on around the state in a broad sense.

Good data in our customer system also supports your professional networking. Did you know that members can access the OTAC membership customer system to search for other members? You can search by last name, organization, city, zip code, practice setting, and/or field of practice. As an example, I just conducted a dual search for members residing in Los Angeles and who practice in gerontology. Four names were listed on my screen as fitting those criteria. So now I could reach out to them with a challenging practice question, or inquire if they know of any job openings, or invite one or more to coffee to discuss issues specific to gerontology. (Please note: there is an option for members to indicate that their record is to not be published, which means other members cannot connect with them through the OTAC membership customer system.)

Get the information you most want. You can help us ensure we send the personalized information you most want by keeping the data in your record current. From your mailing address and email to your title and organization to your practice setting and field of practice, these fields all help to ensure we send you the information you most want. (Note: Any time that you update your mailing address in your OTAC membership record, be sure to notify the California Board of Occupational Therapy about your new address. It’s the law.)

How to Update Your Record.

1. Got to our website, www.otaconline.org.
2. Scroll to the bottom of the website home page.
3. Click on Update Your Contact Info in the Quick Connect (purple area) at the bottom of the page.
4. Log-in with your email address and password.
5. You will be directed to the My Information page.
6. Click on Edit/View Information.
7. You will be directed to the Edit My Information page.
8. You can make all necessary contact/profile information on this page.
9. Once you have updated your record accordingly, click Save at the bottom of the screen.