Background Historically Scottish Partnership for Palliative Care (SPPC) organised a poster display at its annual conference. The pandemic led to the cancellation of the conference, yet there remained an urgent need across many domains to share learning and innovation (Kudchadkar & Carroll, 2020. Pediatr Crit Care Med.21:e538).

Aims To create opportunities for sharing and learning from posters using three virtual elements.

Methods We reviewed potential modes for online dissemination (Reshef, Aharonovich, Armani, et al., 2020. Nat Rev Mater. 5:253). A call for abstracts was made via email. Accepted abstract authors were supplied with a template designed for display both on SPPC’s website and also to optimise display via Twitter. The posters were disseminated in three ways. Firstly, abstracts were displayed in an exhibition on the SPPC website - https://www.palliativecarescotland.org.uk/content/autumn-season-posters-2020/ Secondly, over a one-week period, all posters were tweeted sequentially with the hashtag #SPPCPosterParade. Finally the best posters were presented ‘in person’ at plenary on Zoom, with delegates having the chance to chat with authors in break-out rooms afterwards. To evaluate our approach Twitter data was derived from Twitter Analytics and website data was derived from SPPC’s site content management system.

Results A record number of abstracts was received and 64 posters presented. Posters on the SPPC website were accessed 57, 816 times. From 12-16 October 2020 #SPPCPosterParade tweets by SPPC gained 78871 impressions (the number of times a user is served a Tweet in timeline or search results) and 2637 media views (the number of times the poster images were clicked on). The Zoom plenary had around 100 participants. Participants were enthusiastic and the approach was repeated in 2021. The carbon footprint was lower than conference.

Conclusions The format was acceptable to authors. The reach secured by website and Twitter far exceeded 220 people who normally attend SPPC’s conference, and achieved a wider geographical spread.