NFPA Board Meets; Begins Planning for Next 3-Year Strategy Agenda
By Eric Lanke, NFPA President/CEO
Back in June, our then-new Board chair, David Price of QCC, wrote about the discussions held at the Board’s annual strategic retreat, and many of the networking, education and promotional programs NFPA organizes to strengthen the fluid power industry: https://www.nfpa.com/news/a-message-from-the-incoming-chairman-of-the-nfpa-board-growing-and-deepening-nfpas-impact
These many programs are carefully organized into NFPA’s broader Strategy Agenda, a plan with a three-year time horizon (2023-26) that comprises the outcomes we seek to achieve for our members:
- Effective Forum: NFPA provides an effective forum where its members and OEMs network and advance our collective interests.
- Business Intelligence & Statistics: NFPA provides its members with timely and accurate business intelligence and statistics that support improved decision-making.
- Promote Fluid Power: NFPA provides opportunities and resources for its members to promote the unique strengths and inherent advantages offered by fluid power technology.
- Educated Workforce: NFPA helps increase the number of technical college and university students educated in fluid power and connects them to careers in the fluid power industry.
Now it’s February, and the NFPA Board has reconvened for its second meeting of the fiscal year in order to review our progress on those strategic initiatives and to continue looking ahead to our new three-year Strategy Agenda, which will guide our efforts in 2026-29. Here are some highlights of that discussion.
Effective Forum and Business Intelligence. Our membership is highly representative of the current fluid power industry and its overall numbers are holding steady. We have high engagement across our networking forums, including the Annual Conference, with some weakness among small and medium manufacturers. In addition, our market information programs have the highest engagement values across the entire organization, and they are the most highly correlated with member satisfaction and renewal. And our Industry and Economic Outlook Conference remains strong and highly evaluated, but attendance has been slipping over the past three years. In response to these trends the Board discussed ways to increase the value proposition for our key membership types, especially ways to better connect members to each other and to our one-of-a-kind market information and intelligence programs in an exclusive “member forum.”
Promote Fluid Power. We have growing participation and satisfaction in our Technology Forums, including among OEMs. iVT EXPO has been established as a good and growing show for fluid power and for NFPA. And our messages about interesting and innovative applications of fluid power are increasing and getting more engagement. In response to these trends, the Board reinforced the value of continuing to reach out beyond the membership to end users, OEMs, and allied technology partners to create a broader “industry forum” where fluid power technology can be continually promoted and improved.
Educated Workforce. We have dramatically grown our education programs – now with 7 Fast Track Hubs, 13 Power Partner Universities, and 32 universities in the Fluid Power Vehicle Challenge. The connection to careers in the fluid power industry remains elusive – anecdotal more than documented. And donations to the Foundation are trending down and our resources are beginning to stretch thin. In response to these trends, the Board discussed ways to deepen the impact of our programs by increasing their engagement with NFPA members and by increasing the number of students participating in them.
The final strategy agenda for 2026-29 will be crafted at the Board’s next meeting in June 2026.
Our Board is a high-functioning group, and focused on the issues of direct importance to the membership and to the broader fluid power industry. I encourage you and all NFPA members to get engaged in our key initiatives, as each will help you better connect across the changing supply chain and source the talent you need for continued growth and expansion. Please contact me at elanke@nfpa.com if you’d like to learn more about any of these opportunities.