NFPA Is Growing – and Deepening Its Impact for the Fluid Power Industry
By David Price, Vice President, Sales and Marketing, QCC
The NFPA Board of Directors convened in June 2025 to review NFPA’s performance over the past fiscal year and to make strategic decisions for moving the association forward into the future. As Chair of the NFPA Board for our 2025-26 fiscal year, it was my honor to lead a number of these important discussions. The past fiscal year saw a number of successes across the association’s four high-level strategic objectives for strengthening the fluid power industry and we set the groundwork for a number of exciting projects moving forward.
Through our Effective Forum initiative, we bring our members together in ways that allow them to find new business opportunities and advance their collective interests. We’ve seen another year of positive membership growth for NFPA, with a broad spectrum of our industry’s stakeholders heavily involved in NFPA’s many programs and activities. Two key initiatives we’ll be focused on in the upcoming year are our Annual Conference – which will continue to strengthen its footing as the premier education and networking event for the executive and emerging leadership of the fluid power industry – and our Executive Leadership Program – which will be launching its fourth cohort of participants at that very Annual Conference in February 2026. Both programs are vital to our on-going mission of bringing suppliers, distributors, controls and data firms, and manufacturers together in our effective forum.
Through our Business Intelligence and Statistics initiative, we provide members with the market data and intelligence to help improve their business decision making. NFPA will continue to offer its one-of-a-kind market information portfolio of reports and surveys that help you define and understand the size of the fluid power market and your role in it – and we’ll continue to broaden our general business intelligence gathering and sharing activities. Engagement with our CID members and with a growing cohort of participating OEM engineers will be key in these efforts, as we track and report more formally on the pace of new technology adoption in our industry and in the many markets we serve.
Through our Promote Fluid Power initiative, we provide our members with opportunities and resources to promote themselves and their technology. There are many opportunities for our members in the year ahead – including heightened exposure at the iVT EXPO, CONEXPO, and AUTOMATE trade shows, where NFPA is helping to increase the profile and footprint of cutting-edge fluid power technologies. We thank the many members of our Technology Task Forces, which will be launching a new Industrial Technology Roadmap for fluid power that will help us focus our marketing efforts in those important end markets. Also growing in impact is our Fluid Power Forum podcast, now with more than 150 episodes and 53,000 downloads, an increasingly key tool in spreading the word about advances in our industry. The best thing we can do is share these episodes in our network to help reinforce fluid power as a modern and thriving technology.
And through our Educated Workforce initiative, we are increasing the number of fluid power-educated students and connecting them to careers in the industry. We do this primarily through our Fast Track to Fluid Power and University Power Partner programs, and we ended this fiscal year with 5 Fast Track Hubs and 8 Power Partner Universities. Through the on-going support of members through our Pascal Giving Society, we are making the plans and investments necessary to scale these key programs to more locations over the next several years. Another important item of note is the continued growth and expansion of our Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge program. This unique design/build challenge, which directly connects undergraduate engineers working with fluid power to careers in our industry, expanded to three event sites this past year, allowing us to accommodate more student teams than ever before. A special thanks goes out to all the NFPA member companies that support and make this program possible.
Our Board is excited by the many opportunities that lie ahead in the coming year, both for NFPA and the fluid power industry as a whole. Many thanks to my fellow Board members for the help they provide in shaping our organization’s and industry’s future. I’m looking forward to working with the Board, staff, and NFPA members to continue growing our organization. I am open to questions and comments as we continue to forge ahead and bring enhanced value to members. I can be reached at dprice@qccorp.com.