also want to acknowledge and respond to all who have expressed your feelings about our pricing structure, both for members and residents. As Laura Thevenot shared in her
blog post, the financial implications to a relatively small specialty association have been significant.
Canceling the Miami meeting incurred tremendous costs. Our Annual Meeting is a primary revenue source for ASTRO and because we had to cancel the in-person meeting due to COVID-19 and the need to keep our communities safe, the organization absorbed the many monetary damages associated with canceling a city-wide annual meeting. The Board had to take extraordinary fiscal action inside ASTRO to keep our activities and member support services going. We know the Annual Meeting is the key educational activity of the year for many of our members and, thus, we as a Board decided to go “all in” on the best learning platform possible in order to keep our members engaged and educated and provide an experience that members would be willing to support. We also spoke with numerous department chairs and leaders about their support for their residents. Overwhelmingly, they noted that the savings from airfare, hotels and meals would allow them to support their resident’s attendance at our meeting. And to-date, we have seen strong registrations for our members-in-training. To ensure that as many as possible can attend, we are freezing the member-in-training and student rates at the early-bird level for the duration of the registration period. We also know that many people are still assessing their expenses for the year, so we are also extending our early-bird deadline for all attendees until September 8 to give you more time to secure your annual meeting attendance at the lowest rate.
www.astro.org
