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Using Artificial Intelligence (AI) on ASTM standards and related intellectual property is prohibited. Violations will result in suspension of access.
By David Walsh
Nov 03, 2025
The board approved the following actions:
Brian Meincke, vice president of global business development and innovation strategy, presented on the Standards Acceleration Pilot Program and its four primary objectives:
The program was announced in July 2025. 210 submissions were received from across ASTM’s technical committee structure. 17 proposals were eventually selected as finalists, and 12 RFPs were received from 12 separate committees.
Awardees were notified in October, and work items will be created for each selected proposal, with a technical lead assigned to each. The progress of each proposal will be monitored and the program will be evaluated as organizers look ahead to 2026.
Communications Director Dan Bergels presented on ongoing efforts in several areas:
ASTM has donated to a variety of organizations thus far in 2025, with contributions totaling $234,000 YTD. Donations have gone to organizations such as CureSearch, Sandy Rollman Ovarian Cancer Foundation, AWWR, and [What was the logo with people in a ring?].
Since the content migration to a new CMS in March, and after a delay in re-indexing by Google, Standardization News content (SN.ASTM.org) has more than 122,000 page views, with top performing features covering fire safety, amusement parks, and standards for composting.
In the same time period, press releases received 74,000 page views, with top performers covering the Compass platform and the ICAM 2025 conference. Press releases had an open rate of 34.38%.
ASTM’s total social media followers across all platforms is now 153,000, with LinkedIn accounting for 95,000 and Facebook accounting for 31,000. ASTM posts have received over 3 million impressions in the last year (up 12% YOY), with an engagement rate of 4.3%, up 38% YOY.
“Standards Impact,” ASTM’s official podcast, has now received 27,000 total downloads from 163 countries and territories since its 2024 launch. Topics such as supply chains, commercial spaceflight, and first responders helped increase downloads significantly in the second half of 2025.
ASTM continued to work with numerous news organizations in the second half of 2025 and also received coverage in numerous outlets. ASTM was mentioned in stories by The New York Times, Consumer Reports, Outsell, and The Wall Street Journal.
Candidates were presented for the Safety Equipment Institute’s 2026-2027 board of directors, as well as members of the Test Monitoring Center’s board of directors, who will be renewing their terms for 2026-2027.
Dan Smith, vice president of technical committee operations, presented requests to discharge the committee on emergency medical services (F30) and the committee on declarable substances in materials (F40), both of which were approved. Standards activity in these areas has migrated to other committees.
Nominees for multiple 2026 awards were presented, including the Charles B. Dudley Award, the Debra L. Kaiser Excellence in Leadership Award, the Tony Thornton Award of Excellence, and the Roger L. Barker Award of Excellence.
Howard Gilson, ASTM’s vice president, digital services, updated the board on continuing modernization efforts.
Efforts underway include: Compass and SpecBuilder product modernization; the membership platform; public web and commerce evolution; publishing platform and content operations; and standing up the integration quality capability. Accomplishments of the Technology Innovation Team were also discussed.
Stuart Ratcliffe, ASTM’s vice president, sales and marketing, updated the board on recent developments.
These included ASTM making a significant change in commercial strategy by reducing dependence on outside sales channels after investing in the ASTM 2.0 project to make ASTM standards and the Compass content delivery platform a scalable, stable platform for delivery content directly to all customers regardless of size, sector, or site.
Investment has also been made in sales, support, finance, and digital services functions both in team size and upskilling to onboard and support any and all customers directly through the Compass subscription platform.
Along with this significant move has been the ASTM Digital Library relaunch. To enable this initiative, the Digital Library was moved from the ASTM Compass platform onto the Silverchair platform, which is well suited to host journals, articles, and conference proceedings. With the support of marketing, ASTM has also launched a comprehensive prospecting plan where a curated list of contacts covering 10 targeted industries has been identified. ●
The 2026 ASTM International Board of Directors.
November / December 2025