Membership Numbers

[Fred McKim]

While I knew the membership numbers were presumably only an e-mail away, Gerry pointed out to me that there is a link to them on the web site down in the membership rates section (that we're going to have better marked in the future).

Try: http://www.chess.ca/MemStats.shtml to see for yourself. Shows data as of May 1 2009 and 2010.

On a personal note, I can be happy with our smallest province going up by over 50% - but we're pretty small peanuts.

The other positive note is that our Adult memberships have gone up about 3%, and the reason we lost members overall (42) is due to the loss of members in the recently discontinued junior participating membership.

Bob A, can you remind us again about your conceptual 5/15 (?) membership campaign concept ?

[Bob Armstrong]

This is a duplicate of my post under the thread " CFC Membership Drive? ":

06-19-2010, 11:11 AM
Bob Armstrong
CFC Governor

CFC - Membership Drive?

CFC Membership Stats as of: 2010/05/01

......... Family Honorary Junior LIFE Adult Participating Junior. Total
Total..... 18....... 66 .....176.. 370..975............ 278........... 1883

Total Paying Adults: 975 ( Adult ) + 370 ( Life ) = 1,345
Total Juniors : 176 ( Junior ) + 278 ( Participating Junior - category no longer exists - was the " cheap " option - how many will renew at the highter price? ) = 454

Is it a reasonable target for CFC to try to reach in 2010-11 ( fiscal year started May 1 ) an adult total of 1500 memberships?

Can CFC start a school membership drive to try to increase junior memberships to 500?

I see these as two separate campaigns ( maybe three if the Life Membership category gets separate promotion ). I would call it the " 15/5 " Campaign.

How might CFC go about this, if the goals are thought to be reasonable?

Bob

[Fred McKim]

Thanks for humouring me, Bob. I knew you had talked about this elsewhere. I'm trying to raise awareness that anybody can go look at these numbers.

As we both know there's no fat in the upcoming budget. Paying anything significant for a new web site is likely not in the cards at this time. If we took a 25% drop in membership I expect the magazine would be the first thing to go.

I wish people could share their success stories.

In my province I'd say 90% of the people only join the CFC in order to play in the tournaments (I mean that's likely the case pretty well everywhere). So the more tournaments the more opportunities to snag members.

One good source of tournament players is at the local chess club. So I try to encourage the adults and teens (and really good pre-teens) to play in the open events I have (6 per year), and let the younger ones know all about the local CMA events (who are also now well organized in my province).

Try googling yourself (ie Chess Charlottetown for me) to see how easy you are to find. I'm "old" and lazy or I'd put up a lot of signs around town (in libraries and community centres).

Latch onto the CMA kids. Try to get those good players who are 12 and 13 interested in playing with big guys. I have a group of about 4 or 5 in grades 7-8 that have been moving along through both systems for the past 3-4 years. I hope to keep them at least though high school, and then maybe some lucky University club can get them.

I'm really interested in this Calgary Chess Club Internet match initiative and think we could eventually get a cross country league going with maybe three different rating levels (ie 2200, 1800, 1400).

After the WCF in 1988 Dan Elman started up a City League (Saint John had amazingly just about a 100 CFC members at the time of the WCF) which generally had 8-12 teams of 4 or 5. I would say at least half of these players were unrated. Games were played out a mall club.. It eventually ran it's course. Obviously we'd want the players in any such league to be members, but I'm just throwing ideas out. You've got to attract them first from somewhere.

[Bob Gillanders]

As we both know there's no fat in the upcoming budget. Paying anything significant for a new web site is likely not in the cards at this time. If we took a 25% drop in membership I expect the magazine would be the first thing to go.

Fred,

I see a good website as a priority item. 5 -10k - funded from the capital budget. :)

Memberships have nowhere to go but up!
My target for May 1st 2011 is...... 2,000! :D