News
1,180 attend the last June Summit
The 2026 Leadership Summit drew 1,180 attendees to Washington, DC, and closed with the announcement of NANA's redesigned member portal.
NANA's 2026 Leadership Summit drew 1,180 attendees to Washington, DC, June 3–5, the largest edition since the Summit began. It was the last Summit held in June; the 2027 edition moves to early December.
Attendance and sessions
Attendance rose to 1,180, up from 1,120 in 2025 and 1,050 in 2024. Concurrent sessions ran across governance, finance and dues, membership growth, and digital operations, with CEO Walter Abernathy opening the general session on the state of the association sector.
The portal announcement
On June 5, Director of Digital Renée Okafor announced NANA's redesigned member portal from the general session stage, the first public confirmation of a project the digital team had been building since 2025. The relaunch added single sign-on, a unified resource library, event registration, and chapter directories across all six chapters.
"We built this for the member who manages three logins just to renew, register, and find last year's compensation survey. As of today, that's one login."
— Renée Okafor, Director of Digital
The relaunch, built on the Civic Ledger Software platform selected in mid-2025, rolled single sign-on out to all six chapters simultaneously. Okafor said the team debated a staggered rollout but decided the coordination cost of running two portal systems in parallel outweighed the risk of a single-chapter pilot.
The program beyond the general session
Concurrent sessions this year drew heavily on the year's research: Director of Research Inês Carvalho-Reyes presented early data from the Dues Model Study, and Treasurer Haruko Tanaka led a packed session on what the study's first 300-association survey meant for small organizations weighing a move to tiered dues. A separate track covered chapter leadership, timed to reach attendees ahead of that October's Chapter Leadership Intensive.
CEO Walter Abernathy's opening address touched on membership growth, now at 750-plus organizations, and previewed the coming Dues Model Study pilot phase without naming which twelve organizations would participate.
A record for attendance, not for growth
The 1,180 figure extends a run of steady, not dramatic, increases: 1,050 attendees in 2024, 1,120 in 2025, and 1,180 this year. Director of Meetings and Events Rosalind Kettering, who has run every Summit since 2014, said the growth curve has held roughly steady for three straight editions rather than spiking, which has let her team plan room capacity a year ahead with fewer surprises.
Attendance has grown every year since 2024, from 1,050 to 1,180, a run of three straight increases.
Closing notes
The closing session doubled as the first public look at Summit 2027 logistics: early registration opened on-site, and members were told group rates of 15% apply for delegations of five or more from a single organization. Kettering's team confirmed the December dates carry a lower median hotel rate in Washington than the June dates historically have, one of the reasons the board cited when it voted in November 2025 to move the Summit permanently.
What's next for the Summit
The next Summit moves to December 2–4, 2027
Early registration for the 2027 edition opened at this year's closing session
The 18-month gap between the June 2026 and December 2027 editions is the longest in the Summit's history
Group rates of 15% remain available for delegations of five or more attendees from one organization
Full agenda recordings and session materials are available to members through the newly relaunched portal.