December 8, 2025 — IACMI is one of 18 Manufacturing USA Institutes advancing U.S. leadership in advanced manufacturing. Through public-private collaboration, IACMI accelerates innovation and workforce development in composites and advanced materials, in part, by fostering collaboration among manufacturers, academic institutions, national laboratories, and other stakeholders.
Periodically, it’s important to reach out to our valued stakeholders to see how we’re doing in our communications efforts. Candid feedback is essential to strengthening engagement and better serving the IACMI community. That’s why we devised an anonymous, three-minute survey to help us assess our outreach efforts. Out of 72 responses from key stakeholders, here are the results.
Most respondents were from industry (54%), followed by academia (29%). The vast majority agree our communication methods are easy to find, valuable and relevant to them, timely and clear (up to 91%).
Members are getting most of their information about IACMI from annual Members Meetings, IACMI’s website, our monthly newsletter, and direct emails (all in the 60+%), followed by Innovation Insights, other events & conferences, LinkedIn, and Working Groups (33-43%). The information they’re getting is primarily about IACMI organization, events, technology innovations, and workforce development (50-78%), as well as advanced manufacturing news, funding opportunities, and DOE updates (23-45%).
According to several open-ended questions, we heard positive praise and ideas for improvement.
“I really enjoy the amount of communication and support to our team.”
“IACMI becoming THE ‘reader’s digest’ of what’s going on in the US composites space (funding opportunities, technology breakthroughs, partnership opportunities, policy solicitations, etc.) would be very helpful.”
“IACMI is a great institute and for good reason we mostly operate as an island unto ourselves. It may be advantageous to keep emphasizing the depth of the entre 18 Manufacturing USA institutes and how we could further integrate with them.”
“Some form of virtual networking would be valuable, which could be a monthly virtual social hour, or some clever way to engage and connect membership virtually.”
Moving forward, we will continue to communicate monthly with our Innovation Insights, newsletter, and direct emails as well as several posts a week on LinkedIn. We will be evaluating use of other social channels including Facebook, X, YouTube, and Instagram. IACMI will continue sharing updates from DOE, funding opportunities in advanced manufacturing, the growth of our workforce development programs, and results from IACMI-led projects.
