As I was spelunking in the depths of my hard drive I came across this document from the end of 2013. We had completed the inaugural year of NephMadness and after returning home from Kidney Week, Matt, Edgar, Kenar and myself put together a proposal to make NephMadness a recurring event.
It is remarkable that we were putting the pitch together in November and December when the contest would launch in March. Now NephMadness is a 9 month month process with planning usually beginning in June.
Some notes from the document. In 2014, we were still trying to figure out how to determine the winners. I love this paragraph, especially, “One down side of this is that it will make the contest appear rigged, which it actually is.”
I also like this part which gives you an idea of how small not only NephMadness was in 2013, but how small the footprint for online nephrology education was:
1. We were highlighted at the AJKD editorial board meeting to a geographically diverse, packed room. Dr. Levey asked how many people participated in the first NephMadness and almost no one raised their hand.
2. A day later we demonstrated NephMadness to a room of cutting-edge educators. I got the feeling, besides the usual suspects (Edgar Lerma, Pascale Lane, Tejas Desai, etc.) no one in the room had heard of the campaign. The crazy bit was, I don’t think many had heard of PBFluids.com or NephronPower.com. This really reinforced to me how limited our exposure was. We had reached out to a lot of people and had dramatically boosted the traffic to the blog but to a large extent we were preaching to the choir.
And lastly, in the publicity section we were excited about getting featured on Dr. Mike Sevillas Podcast, which has since gone defunct after 372 episodes!
So here it is for all your NephMadness nostalgia needs…