News
Leadership Summit 2025 draws 1,120 to Washington
NANA's annual Summit ran June 4–6 at the National Conference Center, drawing 1,120 attendees.
1,120 attendees came through NANA's National Conference Center for the 2025 Leadership Summit, held June 4 through 6 in Washington, DC, up from 1,050 the year before.
Three days, one venue
The Summit ran its usual three-day format: a general session each morning, breakout tracks through the afternoons, and an expo hall running throughout. Director of Meetings and Events Rosalind Kettering, who has run every Summit since 2014, said this year's growth in attendance tracked with growth in the number of breakout sessions offered rather than any single change to the program's structure.
Attendance doesn't grow because you add a keynote speaker people are excited about. It grows because you add a track that lets a two-person association staff and a forty-person association staff both find three sessions worth their time.
— Rosalind Kettering, Director of Meetings and Events
What filled the agenda
Breakout tracks this year spanned governance, membership growth, digital operations, and advocacy, with session counts weighted toward the topics that drew the largest afternoon crowds in 2024. The expo hall hosted vendors and sponsors across meetings, insurance, technology, and audit services, the same categories of sponsor NANA has drawn to the Summit in prior years.
General sessions ran each morning in the main ballroom.
Breakout tracks ran in parallel through both afternoons.
The expo hall stayed open for the full three days, adjacent to the main concourse.
Attendance of 1,120 represents roughly 1.5 attendees per member organization, a ratio Kettering's team tracks year over year as a rough proxy for how deeply the Summit reaches beyond each organization's single primary delegate.
Looking ahead
This June Summit was held under the calendar NANA has used since the event's founding, and Kettering's team has already begun early planning for the 2026 edition, again in June. Sponsors for 2025 included Meridian Benefits Group, Civic Ledger Software, Summit Hall Partners, and Kestrel Travel & Housing, all of whom have supported prior editions.
Recordings of general sessions are available to registered attendees through the resource library. Registration for the 2026 Summit will be announced through chapter channels once dates are confirmed.
Who came
Attendee organizations spanned NANA's full membership range, from staff-of-two associations to organizations with dozens of employees. Kettering said the team deliberately prices breakout sessions and workshops the same regardless of attendee count from a given organization, on the theory that a small association sending a single delegate should have the same access to every track as an organization that sends a full delegation.
The Summit's group discount, 15 percent off for five or more attendees from a single organization, continued to draw multi-person delegations from larger member associations, though Kettering's team does not track what share of the 1,120 total came in under that discount specifically. Early-bird registration, which closes 60 days before each Summit, again accounted for the bulk of registrations processed before the event, consistent with the pattern Kettering's team has seen in prior years. Kettering said her team plans to start tracking the group-discount share ahead of next year's Summit.