The European Trade Promotion Organisations' Association (ETPOA) has two clear objectives: promote and represent its members (national Trade Promotion Organisations, regional Trade Promotion Organisations, Agrifood Promotion Organisations) across Europe and foster and enable ever-closer collaboration.
Following the elections of a new Board of Directors for the term 2020 – 2022, we look back at the first two years of its existence retrospectively and point out the milestone actions of ETPOA.
ETPOA started with 12 Founding Members while now it has more than doubled its membership to 27 since 2018, with Enterprise Ireland and RvO Netherlands being the latest additions to the Association.
ETPOA is now recognised as an official stakeholder by the European Commission and as such it was already offered the opportunity to present itself at several occasions such as in DG GROW meetings or the DG Trade's MAAC meeting while, through respective Permanent Representations of ETPOA members, the Association contributed to Council meeting discussions on the new Single Market Programme. ETPOA also has gained itself recognition at stakeholder level by holding a number of bilateral meetings with the Eurochambres, BusinessEurope, ANIMA, EEIA and EURADA to introduce itself and explore grounds for bilateral cooperation.
Very recently, ETPOA published its position paper on a joint EU-Member States agenda for the internationalisation of SMEs. Aligned with its mandate to respond Calls for proposals, its members formed the first two consortia to participate in European calls. It also organised a first round of CEO calls on relevant topics.

ETPOA is concretising its vision via its three Committees, namely: the EU Institutional Dialogue Committee (EUIDC) and the TPO Collaboration Committee (TPOCC). Indicatively:

• The APC worked on common approaches towards trade fair organisers as a result of the devastating effects of COVID-19 on one of our main type of activities for promoting trade. They also wrote a first position paper on the EU Agriculture Promotion Policy;
• The EUIDC produced and shared a study on European Economic Diplomacy and an engagement strategy with the EU Institutions;
• The TPOCC launched a benchmarking survey for its members to identify common grounds and differences among them. Furthermore, it launched two surveys on COVID-19 response to members but also among non-member TPOs and is currently getting ready for the third survey. It also organised a workshop on the Enterprise Europe Network and Technical Support Instrument (TSI).

Finally, ETPOA has been going through a major re-shaping of its identity as an Association and establishing and branding its name by increasing its visibility through its website and corporate LinkedIn account.

Published: November 2020