When Educational Measures rebranded as Array last January, the firm recommitted to serving the specific content-engagement needs of the life-sciences industry. Its latest effort: the Array Content Engagement Score (ACES).
The new measurement methodology is designed to enable those who produce investigator meetings, medical advisory boards, continuing medical education symposia, and other life-sciences events to monitor just how engaged their participants are with the content being presented. It can be used with in-person events, fully online meetings, and hybrid events.
Engagement levels are important to measure because, according to Array’s data collected from more than 7,000 life-sciences events, higher scores tend to correlate with higher knowledge transfer and retention. “Especially for ad boards and investigator meetings, you need to understand how participants are engaging with the content and taking part in the conversation to ensure you’re getting the outcomes you need,” says Jeannie Griffin, (below) vice president of product management with Array. 
ACES’ algorithms measure engagement by collecting data on attendee contributions, such as submitting questions and responding to polling before, during, and after an event. “Scoring is part of an overall strategy to help life-sciences companies benchmark the effectiveness of their events and improve over time,” Griffin says, adding that ACES plus Array’s other data services aim to raise the quality of events across the industry.
The ACES scoring technology uses engagement data points to divide participants into four categories: Conversationalist, Contributor, Joiner, and Spectator. “It gives you a snapshot into the performance of your program,” says Griffin. “For an ad board, for example, you would want to see a lot of Conversationalists, since they are being paid to participate in the dialogue. If you find you have a lot of Spectators instead, that would be a red flag indicating you are not getting the outcome you need.
While ACES can measure the performance of specific events, the goal of this first iteration is to enable organizations to see how event engagement is tracking in aggregate across their programs, Griffin says. While ACES has its own algorithms and benchmarks built in, Array also can work with the systems an organization already has in place to measure outcomes across its programs, she adds.
The next release of ACES will allow organizations to benchmark their performance in various types of life-sciences meetings against that of other organizations, with the overall goal of driving knowledge retention as well as engagement. Griffin notes that “this is so vital in life sciences specifically because the more HCPs retain knowledge, the more meaningful the meeting is—and the more we can pave the way for better patient outcomes in the future.”
