Virtual Annual Meetings Offer Greater Attendance and Efficiency for Associations

The traditional annual meeting, like many functions, has been upended by everyone’s experience with the pandemic. Some have returned to in-person meetings, but David Amster, the president of Prime Locations, says that about two-thirds of his firm’s portfolio are continuing to hold meetings virtually.

Virtual Benefits

“I think there are more benefits than there are negatives,” Amster says. “Obviously, the personal interaction is not there, but participation seems to be higher at virtual meetings. People can be home, they can be across the country or across the world, and still attend a meeting.”

And second: “I think it does keep the meetings, particularly annual meetings, more on track and to the point,” he says. “Over the years there have been some contentious in-person meetings, but on a Zoom platform, it’s more controllable. You don’t have people shouting over people. You can get your points across. We try to give everybody the opportunity to speak if they so desire, and I think this works a lot better — from our standpoint, certainly.”

Business Benefits

The purpose of the annual meeting is business, even though for many associations it has also carried social benefits. “I’ve been to annual meetings where boards supply refreshments to get people to come down or go to the meeting, and it becomes a little bit of a social event, in addition to the business at hand,” Amster says. “But the reality is, the annual meeting is a business meeting, and it’s a very important meeting to be done each year so that you can elect officers to run the corporation.”

From the viewpoint of the professionals who attend annual meetings, Amster says it’s a win-win. “We like it because if a meeting starts at 6:30, 7 at night, you’re not having to drive back home after the meeting ends,” he says. “So the travel time’s not there, and it just makes it a lot easier.” Additionally, many professionals can schedule more than one annual meeting a night if they are conducted virtually.

Virtual Groundwork

As many boards have already experienced, the processes for calling a virtual annual meeting are a bit different from  the ones for an in-person meeting. “First, we send out a save-the-date memo,” Amster says, “asking anyone interested in running to please submit a brief biography and reasons why they want to be on the board. Then we can preprint their names on the ballots and proxies so people know who’s running ahead of time. We usually do a candidates night a week before, and that’s held on Zoom. So some of the processes have changed, but the purpose of the meeting is still the same: It’s to elect the board. If there’s no quorum, basically the board remains.”

Some boards have moved to hybrid meetings, part Zoom and part in-person. These can be tricky, Amster says, “unless you’re doing it in a venue that is supportive of it.”

He continues: “It’s hard to do a hybrid meeting in the lobby of a building because you just don’t have the technology there. Basically, management might be standing at a podium with a laptop, and people who are on the Zoom part of it don’t get the whole feeling of the meeting. People in the audience may not hear a question coming through the Zoom. It just doesn’t work as well as it should — at least, not today.”

Additional Cost

To run a virtual meeting, additional staff is often required, creating additional costs. “We need a specific person,” Amster says, “to take attendance, calculate votes and deal with people who are voting through chat or email. It can’t be the manager, and it can’t be me. So we charge for it because we have to have an extra person that wouldn’t normally be at an in-person meeting.”

Look to the Future

The questions remain: Can an association successfully manage a virtual and in-person meeting, and how would that look? “In the past year,” Amster notes, “I see more boards leaning to a mix of both. Maybe we do an in-person meeting every couple of months and we do a Zoom meeting in between. You still have those boards who want to meet every month in person, but by mixing up the two, board members can attend, no matter where they are.”