Prior to NAVA's founding, Smith worked with Guyanese President Cheddi Jagan to design Guyana's new flag in the early 1960s.

[3] Since its founding, the association has met annually across the United States and Canada to present and discuss research, share their passion for flags, and to honor vexillological achievement.

Smith, in his capacity as president, assisted numerous governments on designing their flags, including Aruba, Bonaire, and the Saudi Arabian navy.

The survey notably resulted in low scores being given to flags that shared an identical design pattern: the state seal superimposed on a monochrome background, commonly white or blue.

These principles recommend that flags avoid using letters or seals, include meaningful symbolism, and employ two or three basic colors.

[12] In 2016, then Prime Minister Frank Bainimarama announced that Fiji was abandoning plans to change the flag after the country won its first ever Olympic gold medal.

This has led to residents in states and cities that are represented by flags that rank poorly with NAVA, or that are otherwise considered to be bad or offensive designs, to launch efforts to redesign them.

Mississippi and Georgia's flags invoked Confederate imagery while Minnesota's depicted a white settler displacing a Native American in a negationist manner.

Despite a strong public response, the group failed to find a lawmaker to take up the redesign proposal in the state's 2009 legislative session.

[23] After discovering NAVA's 2004 survey on city flags, American radio host and podcaster Roman Mars began to cover the topic on his show 99% Invisible in late 2014.

[24] In early 2015, his Ted Talk covering NAVA's five principles titled Why city flags may be the worst-designed thing you've never noticed went viral, garnering over five million views.

One such person was Miro Weinberger, mayor of Burlington, Vermont, who launched an effort in early 2017 to change the city flag after watching the video.

Norman adopted its new flag in 2020 after a citizen-led committee reviewed over one hundred designs and allowed residents to vote on the five finalists in an online poll.

Utah state representative Andrew Stoddard, for instance, expressed concern that one of the finalists bore too much of a resemblance to the logo of Delta Air Lines.

[31] NAVA also maintains an archive of case studies of their involvement in the redesign process of flags for cities and states across North America.