Mitigating COVID Conference Risks

While COVID-19 forced the cancellation of many in-person conferences, a few bold credit union organizations held gatherings in person anyway in recent months despite the risk of the ubiquitous deadly virus.

Fortunately, not a single reported COVID-19 case resulted from any of these conferences. In addition to strictly complying with all of the CDC-recommended guidelines, conference organizers said they added layers of safety measures and enforced the guidelines by reminding people to wear their masks properly. They also implemented other strategies to make sure people socially distanced and frequently sanitized their hands.

Matt Purvis, principal of Purvis Management in Eugene, Ore., was one of the featured speakers at the National Credit Union Management Association conference in late September at the Coeur d’Alene Resort in Idaho.

For Purvis, and everyone else at the NCUMA conference, it was a novel experience that will not be forgotten.

“I kind of cracked the door open and looked in at the audience; it was really odd to see six-foot tables spread throughout the giant conference hall and one person sitting at each table,” Purvis recalled. “So, you know, that tells you, OK, we’re in a different time and place right now. It was a different type of feeling, but I did sense from the folks at the conference that they were kind of excited to be there, for sure. It was a novel experience, I think, for everybody.”

For Purvis, this was his first in-person conference since the pandemic began. All the other ones he had been booked for had been cancelled. He felt comfortable attending the NCUMA conference because the virus case numbers were lower than they were earlier in the year, and because of the safety precautions the conference hotel and NCUMA had in place.

Kathy Anchors-Budd, president/CEO of NCUMA based in Atlanta, is no stranger to running conferences under stressful conditions. The national group was founded in 1949 by her father, Jerry Anchors, who was tragically killed in a car accident along with his wife, Barbara Ann, shortly before a scheduled NCUMA conference in Jackson Hole, Wyo., in 2004. Because it was too late to cancel the conference, Kathy flew out to Wyoming to run it, just four days after the funeral.

Before COVID, NCUMA held four to six conferences annually for credit union executives. This year, the organization managed to hold three conferences.

In the spring when COVID hit numerous states, triggering a lot of uncertainty and stay-at-home orders, Anchors-Budd joked that having a crystal ball would have been super helpful.

“I think everybody just was kind of watching and waiting, but we decided to take it conference by conference,” she said. “The safety of our NCUMA members, of course, is most important so we took some feedback from them and they were supportive of us proceeding location by location, conference by conference. So we definitely paid a lot of attention to each particular location. The conference hotels where we typically hold these conferences are trusted partners that we’ve had relationships with for a long time.”

Before green-lighting a conference, however, NCUMA did a lot of due diligence to find out what changed at the hotel conference venue since the organization held its last conference there, and what safety protocols, procedures and measures were in place to protect people from contracting the virus.

“After we felt confident with that, we proceeded with the conference,” she said.

One of the extra safety measures NCUMA implemented was the use of color-coded wrist bands that employees wore to communicate their comfort level of interaction with others. A green wrist band meant the attendee was OK with talking and not concerned with social distancing, a purple wrist band meant the person was OK with talking as long as no one got too close, and a red wrist band meant the person was keeping his or her distance and did not want to get close or talk to anyone. Everyone was required to wear a mask when they were walking around the venue.

“The wrist bands gave everybody the opportunity to choose how they wanted to navigate the conference,” Anchors-Budd explained. “So those procedures in place really catapulted us to success because it took the burden off the attendees to say, ‘This is what I’m comfortable with or what I’m not comfortable with.’”

Although there was some apprehension in the air on the first day of the conference about how all of it was going to work, attendees were much more at ease during the subsequent days.

“I feel like it was such an uplifting experience for everyone,” she said. “The feedback that I got over and over again was ‘Thank you, I needed this. I needed to get out.’”

For Morgan McKinney, an executive benefits consultant for the Boston-based OM Financial Group, attending NCUMA’s conference in Naples, Fla., in early November was a welcoming experience because she enjoys hitting the conference circuit and meeting with clients and prospective customers as well. Before COVID, McKinney and her fellow colleagues spent about 80% of their time on the road attending conferences.

She said she was comfortable attending the NCUMA conference, noting that the color-coded wrist bands in addition to other precautions lent respect to everyone’s comfort level insofar as interacting with other attendees. Held at the Ritz-Carlton, McKinney also noticed that the hotel staff significantly stepped up their cleaning and sanitizing efforts.

“I don’t know if they sprayed bleach in the air or what they did, but it was clean,” she said.

McKinney also attended the Dakota Credit Union Association’s annual conference in early October, which had some luck on its side because it was held just before COVID cases began to surge in North and South Dakota. More than 100 credit union professionals and vendors attended DCUA’s conference and not a single COVID-19 case has been reported as a result. Dakota Credit Union Association President/CEO Jeff Olson acknowledged that because DCUA is a small organization, serving 71 credit unions, it made the convention more manageable, though it might be more challenging for leagues that serve hundreds of credit unions.

In addition to NCUMA’s conferences that were held in Idaho and Florida, the organization sponsored a conference in late August to early September at the Ritz Carlton in Amelia Island, also in the Sunshine State.

What also may have helped keep the virus at bay was lower attendance. Anchors-Budd said attendance at NCUMA’s conferences dropped by 30% to 60%.

“That actually was great for us because we did make a decision that we may have to cap the numbers in order to create a safe environment for folks,” she explained. “So that [decline in attendance] was in line with what we wanted so that our members would feel confident and safe.”

Controlling the number of people who attend events also worked for the $26.2 billion Pentagon Federal Credit Union in McLean, Va., which managed to hold numerous events across the nation this year while strictly adhering to CDC safety guidelines.

For PenFed President/CEO James Schenck, approaching the uncertainties of the coronavirus means leveraging risk mitigation instead of risk avoidance.

“Instead of hosting 600 people this year, we hosted our Annual Military Heroes Gala in October for 80 people,” Schenck said. “We held it in a ballroom, so we had plenty of social distancing. We’d been at this for nine months and we’ve been successful at it because we really do practice the CDC guidance of thoroughly and frequently washing hands, distributing hand sanitizers, social distancing and keeping a mask on if you’re out of your seat.”

Moreover, a critical part of properly mitigating risk is enforcing CDC guidelines and not falling into complacency. For example, if someone is wearing a mask over their mouth but not their nose, they can be respectfully asked to cover their nose, and if someone is not social distancing, they can be reminded that they need to do so.

“If you enforce the precautions you will have successful outcomes,” Schenck said.