News Archive

Kendall Berry, Treasurer-elect 2021–2022

Hi! First thanks for trusting me and electing me as your treasurer-elect. When I ran, I told you I wanted to bring transparency about Health Physics Society (HPS) funds to you, my fellow members, and this is one way I plan to try to make good on my promise. If you have questions about HPS funds, please reach out to me and I will answer your questions. I may even use your question as a future topic for "HPS Funds Demystified."

The first topic I want to address is the suggestion that I have heard repeated multiple times: "Virtual meetings or virtual attendance should be free to members." I love this idea, but the reality is that there are significant costs involved in standing up a live-hybrid meeting, costs that we incur above and beyond the traditional audio-visual costs for HPS meetings. Your HPS Board has been progressive and jumped all in on trying novel hybrid meetings, starting with a spring workshop in 2021. We now have three hybrid meetings under our belts in this experiment. We are continuing to learn and evaluate what we can and cannot expect in hybrid meetings. Most recently, for the HPS IRPA North American Regional Congress we opted for a more expensive platform to address comments and concerns raised by virtual attendees at our prior two meetings. However, this came at a projected budget increase of $10,000 over the platform we used previously. In fact, the estimated additional cost for the platform and platform support for the meeting added $27,000 to our meeting expenses. Yes, it costs more to provide a virtual attendee experience in addition to an in-person experience.

Here are images from the HPS IRPA North American Regional Congress that show the extensive setup required to provide a virtual platform.

I already spoke about the platform costs, but we also have additional AV costs. You can see in the images the additional web cameras that were included, and our AV team had multiple computers set up at their workstations in each of our presentation rooms to serve as backups in order to provide the best service possible.

There is another cost to providing a live virtual meeting, one that cannot easily be priced. Our vendors who sponsored the meetings in Phoenix and St. Louis saw less foot traffic due to decreased in-person attendance. While by and large they are understanding of the impact of the current pandemic on attendance, if we continue to provide fewer interactions with potential customers at meetings, some of our vendors may be forced to reconsider sponsorship of our meetings. What do we lose if that happens? First, the registration fees paid by the vendors. Second, the sponsored breaks that facilitate the dialogue between attendees and vendors. You hear this wonderful buzz of people connecting at the sponsored breaks; I cannot begin to put a price on the value of these interactions.

I hope this information has proven enlightening and that you now have a better understanding why virtual attendance is not able to be free and, in fact, increases several costs on our society. We are not done our experiment with hybrid meetings, and we will continue to learn and evolve, but you may see higher costs for virtual attendance in the future to offset the increased cost of running the meeting and the loss of foot traffic for our vendors. We miss you and look forward to getting back to traditional in-person numbers soon.