The fourth Executive Leadership Forum, which met in Barcelona on 8 and 9 June 2011, discussed new technologies. The association reported the meeting under a headline that named the sector's ambition directly: getting from 40 to 80 million consumers by 2020.
The number in that headline was the sector's own. EHFA's published figures for the period put the European health and fitness sector at around 40,000 facilities and some 40 million members, employing about 390,000 people. Reaching the second figure would not come from selling more memberships to the people who already held one. It meant reaching people who did not join a club, or who joined and drifted away. New technology touched that problem from several sides at once: activity measured and followed outside a facility, programmes delivered online, members kept in contact between visits rather than only when they came through the door.
For the association, the commercial question carried a standards consequence. If people exercise in new ways, in new places and under new kinds of supervision, the qualifications the sector recognises have to describe the work they are actually doing. The technical experts were already reaching into population groups the general instructor standard did not cover, with work under way in 2011 on older adults, children and adolescents, and exercise referral. See events and Vision 2016 for the strategy behind the ambition.