STLE membership demographics
By Kevin Delaney, STLE President | TLT President's Report July 2025
STLE strives to increase engagement and membership all around the world.
The STLE Executive Committee had their summer retreat during the week of July 14. We discussed things like the strategic plan, financial results, partnerships, board membership and something that I thought was particularly interesting: membership demographics. I know, it sounds kind of boring, but wouldn’t you like to know how you fit in with the organization?
First of all, if we look at geography, 81% of our members are from the U.S., and if you add Canada and Mexico, 88% are from North America. We are talking about how focus more on increasing membership in Mexico and explore opportunities in Asia and Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). We would love to hear from our existing members in those regions regarding what made them become members and what might make membership more appealing
(see Figure 1).
Figure 1. STLE membership demographics by global region.
We have a new opportunity to address the geography of our membership with STLE Vice President Steffen Bots, who is based in Germany, and who also travels extensively to other parts of the world.
Regardless of geography, STLE engages members and nonmembers from various industries. Over 60% of members are either lubricant manufacturers or additive manufacturers/suppliers. Nonmembers are pretty evenly split between those two categories plus academics
(see Table 1). The categories that we would like to increase are end-users and OEMs. We would like to know what member benefits would be attractive to these two groups. Keeping in mind the “Connect” portion of our strategy, we believe interactions between these groups would be beneficial to all. We have recently begun meeting with OEMs at the STLE annual meeting to see how we can encourage more participation.
Table 1. STLE member and nonmember industries
We also discussed engagement of members and nonmembers based on what services they have used. Engagement from members was about four times that of nonmembers, but on a percentage basis, the topics they chose matched up almost exactly
(see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Member versus nonmember interest.
No single area seems to be preferred, with the percentages ranging from about 2% to 6%, but in the future, we can look at trends to see if we should provide more content in an emerging area of interest. If you don’t see your area, please let us know and we can work to include it.
The STLE Executive Committee retreat was an excellent opportunity to step back and examine where we are and where we are going. The meeting generated numerous action items. Now the real work begins.
Your voice matters. To send questions, issues, comments, suggestions, or feedback to STLE, email
community@stle.org.
Kevin Delaney is global sales director for the Petroleum Group at Vanderbilt Chemicals, LLC, based in Norwalk, Conn. You can reach him at kdelaney@vanderbiltchemicals.com.