Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Membership Trends

Posted by Rear Admiral Sarah Hemenway (Presidential Candidate) in Questions for the Candidates - Membership Trends

Posted by Joe P in Questions for the Candidates - Membership Trends
This is another set of questions for anyone who wants to answer.

Something that has not been talked about publicly very much lately is club membership trends. Which, I think is disappointing because… something very interesting has been going on for the past 10 months or so.

https://www.star-fleet.com/stats/membership/

The chart that I’ve linked to is membership data since we moved to Exodus. It is not a “live” chart; the query to measure the total active membership is very slow and thus I only run it periodically. As of right now, the chart is current up to July 5 (yesterday).

What I find incredibly shocking about this chart, is that for the first time in the entire time I have been in the club there is a consistent upward trend since the end of October. Membership from 2012 to 2016 was largely flat at around 120 members; in 2017 and 2018 it dipped a little bit but was mostly flat around 100 members. Last year, we dipped to 80 members, which is the lowest number I’ve ever personally witnessed. Since that minimum though, the club has grown almost every single month, and yesterday we set a record high for the past two years.

I know the easy joke to make is that it’s really easy for the club to do well during a pandemic that shuts down the entire global economy. And clearly you can see a big spike in April that is likely due to COVID. But… we were already trending upward anyway. Which, I think is something people haven’t really noticed or thought about much, let alone talked about. So, I want to see what you all think about it.

1) Why, excluding COVID (which will get its own questions in a separate post), do you think membership has been trending upward for most of the past year? Do you think this trend is significant? How do you determine what significance is?

2) What, if anything, does this upward trend suggest to you? Is there anything we ought to be doing differently right now? Is there any part of your plans that you would change with this new information? Or should we not change anything?

There will likely be follow up questions, since this is one of those really complicated, totally open-ended topics.

Joe

I’ve been keeping an eye on this data as part of the Personnel Department over the last two terms and it makes me really excited. While STF is a fantastic club with 80-90 members, it’s even more fantastic with more. :) I’ve had the benefit of being able to interact with a lot of these new members and the primary reasons I’ve heard for greater interest are Picard and the pandemic (I know you excluded this and I’ll get to your other post soon).

I’m hesitant to say that we should be doing anything completely differently as a result of these new members, but they do have a significant impact on how we need to look at STF over the coming months. Our next platform post will tackle this very issue and it should be up shortly. One point I will make is that we will need to spend some time over the next eight months deciding as a club how we want to deal with the new canon of Picard, particularly given our active year. This will unavoidably influence many aspects of the club.

Sarah

Hmm, so that seems like basically the same answer as your current opponent as to the cause. Which is fine, it’s probably the correct one.

Is this new canon with Picard thing something you’re going to address specifically in a platform post? I mean, Rob Archer posted something about EDept a little bit after you posted this answer, so I’m not sure if that’s what you were talking about. If you don’t have a platform post in the can for it, can you maybe riff on that a bit? What exactly do you think we need to do to “deal with the new canon of Picard” besides agree on what kind of shirts we’re all wearing?

Joe

No, we do not have the Picard canon as an aspect of our platform. Honestly, I’m not sure exactly what the bullet point of “deal with the new canon of Picard” is comprised of other than a discussion at the club level about details such as character bios not making sense given new history, whether we should advance our active year, etc. It’s been a while since we’ve had new canon that directly impacts our era and, in the past, we’ve always been enough “in the future” to make things work.

• Sarah