I thought I would take this opportunity to provide you with a review of the 2021 AASV Annual Meeting. As you recall, we just squeaked by in 2020 and were able to complete an in-person meeting in Atlanta as COVID-19 was breaking in the United States. It quickly became evident that it was highly unlikely that our 52nd Annual Meeting was going to be held in person as planned. I began negotiations in June 2020 to modify our contract with the hotel in San Francisco. Obviously, the hotel was reluctant to provide any concessions to the contract until they were certain they were not going to be able to hold our event. After much persistence, in mid-October, we were finally able to secure an agreement to move the 2021 meeting in San Francisco to 2025. This gave the AASV staff approximately 20 weeks to transition our planning from a typical in-person meeting to a virtual format. As it turns out, we needed every minute of that.
Starting way back in July, the staff was attending virtual conferences and interviewing virtual meeting providers to evaluate the format options available and the various capabilities and costs. I found this particularly challenging. The virtual world speaks a whole different language than I do. What I call a “presentation,” they call a “session,” and a group of sessions becomes a track. Everyone involved is assigned a “role” or “roles” and you cannot do anything your “role” does not allow. I signed a contract with Hubb on December 8th as our virtual event provider.
Even after we finally settled on Hubb as our provider, the learning curve was steep. Working with neophytes like us to adapt a tried and true 51-year-old in-person meeting to fit a virtual format is still a novel undertaking for virtual providers as well. While Hubb provided resources and project managers, a lot of their standard operating procedures just did not always work or really fit our way of conducting a continuing education meeting.
The AASV staff began holding 3 staff meetings a week throughout December, January, and February. Sue, Abbey, and Sherrie each began working on individual pieces of the project, interacting with speakers, attendees, session moderators, technical table representatives, and Hubb personnel to bring it all together. Following the 2020 Annual Meeting, I used this column to compare designing the meeting to making sausage. That analogy was even more true with the 2021 meeting. We took the whole hog, ground it all up, and came out with a brand-new product that none of us had ever tasted before, and then we served it to over 900 of our closest friends and family. Thankfully, from the reviews we have received so far, you consumed what we offered, came away intellectually nourished, and even had a little fun. So, as intellectual sausage-making goes, I think it was a success.
But, how did it stack up against previous years and what does this technology mean for the future? Well, after several years of rising attendance, this year’s attendance was down by 15% to 20%. In addition, the number of paid Technical Tables declined from 92 in 2020 to just 55 in 2021. International attendance also declined compared to 2020. The number of student, speaker, and Technical Table representatives attending the meeting all remained about the same as in 2020. So, overall, income from the meeting will be down compared to previous years. On the bright side, however, expenses were significantly decreased compared to a traditional in-person meeting. Thus, in the end, it will still have been a profitable meeting for AASV. That is important because profits from the annual meeting represent one of the three main sources of income supporting our annual operating expenses (the other two being dues and advertising support in the Journal of Swine Health and Production and the e-Letter).
I would like to take this opportunity to sincerely thank those Technical Table companies that stuck with us and supported the association and its members. Please take a minute to reach out to those representatives and express your gratitude for their continued support. A list of those companies can be found on page 154 of this JSHAP issue. I realize that every company values their marketing dollars differently and they have to decide how they maximize their return on investment. But, in my opinion, exhibiting during the AASV Annual Meeting is a bargain, particularly in a virtual platform given the decreased costs associated with travel. In addition to a dedicated exhibit site, the Technical Table fee includes registration of up to three representatives for the meeting (with the opportunity to register up to 3 additional representatives for a fee), access to the attendees, and the opportunity to provide an oral presentation and a poster during the Industrial Partners and poster sessions.
Overall, I think our experience with a virtual format annual meeting was mixed. It was a huge challenge learning how to make it work and working with a third party to design the platform. Attendance was down, as was support from our allied companies. We also missed out on the opportunity to interact face-to-face with our colleagues and friends. The hallway talk is always a highlight of the meeting and really cannot be duplicated virtually. On the upside, however, this format offers the opportunity to view many more of the presentations than would be possible in a traditional setting. There was no travel to contend with, no one noticed you were attending the sessions in your pajamas, and you did not have to eat hotel food or fight for the last ice cream sandwich. The meeting was less expensive to produce.
Some attendees have expressed a desire that we continue to provide a recorded or virtual component to the meeting in the future. Ultimately, that would be something for the board to decide. It should be noted that a hybrid offering would come with significant additional costs associated with recording and transmission of content as well as likely penalty fees from the hotels for failure to meet our minimum attendance numbers established by the hotel contract.
To wrap this up, I would like to personally thank our staff for their hard work to make this meeting successful. They all went above and beyond what was asked of them. All that work would have been for naught, however, if you guys had not shown up and participated. So, my thanks to you as well for attending the meeting and actively participating to make it the best virtual meeting AASV has ever held! Here is hoping we are together again in person in 2022 in Indianapolis.
Harry Snelson, DVM
Executive Director