Due to continued concerns for the health and safety of all members, industry partners, volunteer leaders, staff and other stakeholders during the COVID-19 pandemic, the American Society of Association Executives has decided to extend its virtual meeting planning through February 2021.
This decision impacts CEO Symposium programs scheduled in January and February, which will now be held virtually; an Exceptional Boards program in January, which will also now be virtual; and ASAE’s Great Ideas Conference, which was scheduled to take place Feb. 21-23, 2021, in Salt Lake City. Working in close cooperation with ASAE’s event sponsor Visit Salt Lake, Great Ideas has been moved to Feb. 24-26, 2022 at the Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City.
ASAE is currently planning for a hybrid approach to its larger meetings taking place later in 2021, where there would be both an in-person event and a virtual platform for attendees as well. This includes the 2021 Marketing, Membership, & Communications (MM&C) Conference, which is scheduled to take place in Washington, D.C., June 2-3, 2021, and the 2021 ASAE Annual Meeting & Exposition, which will take place August 14-17, 2021, in Dallas, Texas.
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ASAE is making the decision now to convert to virtual or reschedule in-person meetings and conferences through February so that our community can plan accordingly,” says ASAE President and CEO Susan Robertson (pictured left), CAE. “Like everyone, we remain hopeful that COVID-19 can be mitigated in the months ahead. Right now, the number of new coronavirus cases a day continues to grow and we are in a crucial stretch where time will tell whether the crisis is further exacerbated or brought under control. We are extremely confident about the future of face-to-face meetings down the road and are carefully planning to bring our community together in person later in 2021.”
ASAE’s learning content has been entirely virtual during the pandemic, and major meetings such as the MM&C Conference in late April and the Annual Meeting & Exposition in August have generated high registration numbers and positive evaluations from participants. ASAE is deep into planning for the upcoming Virtual Technology Exploration Conference (TEC) on Dec. 7-9, 2020, and registration currently has three times more association professional attendees than the typical in-person attendance for this meeting, and continues to grow.
“ASAE is very fortunate to have great working relationships with our event partners and host hotels throughout the country and we thank them for their cooperative spirit and professionalism as we move certain meetings to virtual,” says
, Amy Ledoux (pictured right), CAE, CMP, ASAE’s chief learning and meetings officer. “We’re looking forward to meeting again face-to-face. We miss convening our members, volunteers and industry partners in an in-person setting but we can only do that when it’s absolutely safe for everyone.”
ASAE members and partners who have registered for the January or February CEO Symposiums or the January Exceptional Boards program will be contacted by ASAE staff to confirm the dates of the virtual offerings and whether they want to participate. Also, any hotel reservations made for any of these programs will be cancelled by ASAE and notification will be sent to registrants.
ASAE is a membership organization of more than 48,000 association executives and industry partners representing 7,400 organizations. Since it was established 100 years ago, its members have and continue to lead, manage and work in or partner with organizations in more than a dozen association management disciplines, from executive management to finance to technology. With the support of the ASAE Research Foundation, a separate nonprofit entity, ASAE is the premier source of learning, knowledge and future-oriented research for the association and nonprofit profession and provides resources, education, ideas and advocacy to enhance the power and performance of the association and nonprofit community. For more info, visit asaecenter.org.
