EHFA reported in May 2010 that its third European Fitness Forum had broken the attendance records of the series. The association's own end-of-year message recorded 128 delegates at the Madrid meeting, drawn from across the industry. The association issued the report as a press release, the channel it used for news it wanted the wider sector to read.
The forums mattered to the association because they were the point in the year at which the qualifications work met the people who had to apply it. A framework is drafted by a technical council and signed off by a board; it is adopted only once operators, training providers and national associations have argued about it in the same room. Attendance was a rough measure of whether that was happening outside the circle that had written it, and holding the forum in a different region each year was how the association reached professionals who would not travel to Brussels.
The Madrid forum came in the same year as the global meeting of training, certification and awarding bodies that the association held in London and later described as a highlight of the year, and which the participants agreed should become an annual event. See fitness forums and the 3rd fitness forum.