Membership Survey Continues to Show High Level of Membership Value

Over the past several months, with the help of an outside research firm, we surveyed more than 550 member contacts about their satisfaction with NFPA membership, importance and satisfaction with specific programs, agreement with NFPA’s strategic direction, and impressions of the major challenges faced now and in coming years.

This will be the first in a series of news items summarizing the results of the survey and offering comparisons with results from past years. We’ll start from a high level overview and move toward more specific findings in later posts.

Overall our response was down a little this year, with 153 of 565 contacts responding, for a rate of 27%. Among respondents, overall satisfaction with NFPA membership remains high, with 80% indicating they are satisfied or very satisfied with NFPA membership. The remaining 19% chose a neutral response on the five point scale, with only 1 respondent somewhat dissatisfied with membership.

Satisfaction didn’t vary much by size of company, or whether hydraulic or pneumatic focused, but supplier members were most likely to be very satisfied 47%, followed by distributors and manufacturers, each at 31%.

Likelihood to renew also remains at a high level, having rebounded from 86% likely or very likely during the recession in 2010, to the current 94%. Again, there was not much difference by size of company or whether focused on hydraulics or pneumatics, though a higher percent of distributor members (90%) indicated they are very likely to renew compared with 79% of supplier members and 77% of manufacturer members.

Members were also asked…“how would you describe for your peers why you belong to NFPA?”

Responses were clustered into categories shown in the table above, which were somewhat subject to interpretation. But the general message is networking, statistical and market data, and keeping informed/connected with industry (these responses seemed somewhat distinct from networking) emerged as the three areas at top of mind for most members.

The responses are fairly consistent with past surveys, and are further reflected in questions we asked about the importance of specific services and activities. But we’ll report on that in a later update. Watch for more…

If you have any questions, please contact Pete Alles at palles@nfpa.com.