News
Leadership Summit 2024 draws 1,050 to Washington
NANA's largest annual gathering ran three days at the NANA National Conference Center.
1,050 association executives, board members, and staff attended Leadership Summit 2024, held June 5–7 at the NANA National Conference Center in Washington. It was NANA's largest Summit to date, and the third consecutive year attendance has grown.
Three days, one building
Rosalind Kettering, NANA's director of meetings and events, has run every Summit since 2014. This year's program kept general sessions and breakouts under one roof for the first time, cutting the walk between buildings that had drawn complaints in past years when sessions split across the Conference Center and a nearby hotel.
"Attendees told us the same thing every year: too much time spent moving between buildings," Kettering said. "This year we fixed that. Nobody should lose fifteen minutes of a thirty-minute break just walking to the next room."
Kettering's team also expanded the exhibit hall footprint by roughly a third to accommodate sponsor booths, after several sponsors from the 2023 Summit reported the previous hall felt cramped by midday Tuesday.
What filled the agenda
The three-day program included:
A Tuesday general session on the state of association dues models, previewing research NANA's team would later expand into a full benchmarking study
Breakout tracks for chapter leaders, general counsel, and government-relations staff, each running six sessions across the three days
A Wednesday evening reception in the exhibit hall, sponsored jointly by two of NANA's Summit sponsors
A closing address from CEO Walter Abernathy on the year ahead
"The associations that are going to struggle in the next five years aren't the small ones or the large ones. They're the ones that haven't looked hard at their own dues model since the last recession."
— Walter Abernathy, closing general session
First-time attendees
Roughly 22 percent of this year's registrants were attending their first Summit, a figure Kettering's team began tracking this year for the first time. New-attendee orientation sessions ran each morning before the main program, walking first-timers through the building layout and how to make the most of the breakout tracks.
Looking to next year
Attendance has grown each year since NANA began tracking it, and the 2025 Summit is already on the calendar for June in Washington. Kettering said her team is already discussing whether the Conference Center can hold a Summit larger than 1,050 without further changes to the room layout, a question that will factor into planning well before registration opens.
Feedback from the floor
Post-Summit surveys, sent to all registrants the week after the event, returned responses from about 40 percent of attendees. The single most requested change was more break time between back-to-back breakout sessions, a note Kettering said her team had already flagged internally after walking the halls during transition periods.
Sponsors from the exhibit hall reported stronger foot traffic than in prior years, which Kettering attributed partly to the expanded hall footprint and partly to a redesigned floor plan that routed attendees past every booth on the way between the two largest breakout rooms. Kettering said her team will carry the same floor plan forward into next year's Summit.