During a recent discussion of levels of Society participation, I was asked about long-term trends in overall membership numbers.
As it happens, I had previously extracted some of the relevant figures from other sources — some of which showed up in a post about kingdom-level breakdowns — but hadn’t gotten around to publishing the older numbers here, because the data is incomplete and would benefit from additional review and cleanup.
That said, even if the specific numbers are taken with a grain of salt, the overall pattern shown here is likely of interest to others, so I might as well share this as a work-in-progress.
Please do bear in mind these significant caveats:
- Data from 1992-2001 are backed out of a membership graph I found online and definitely imprecise.
- Data from 2002 and later are averages across that year’s monthly totals from sca.org, in an effort to smooth out the jitter that happens from one month to the next; in some years, data is only available for a subset of months so those are what was averaged.
- I have no confidence that international memberships are counted in a consistent fashion across all of these years.
Two obvious discontinuities stand out, the first being between 2002–2004.
- One element contributing to this bump is the introduction of a non-member surcharge of $3 at each event starting in about 2003, which incentivized folks who attended several events per year to purchase a membership.
- Another possible cause of that discontinuity may be a result of a change in how family memberships were counted — I believe I have heard that at one point, family memberships were not counted towards the totals, but that impression is based on a vague memory and the details or timing could be off.
The other major disruption shows up in the wake of Covid, which led to a suspension of all in-person events for more than a year.
- No membership data was reported during 2021 when there was a “freeze” that halted membership expiration.
- Preliminary numbers for 2023 show signs of a recovery from the bottom of the Covid drop-off but still 20% down from the pre-plague levels.
The numbers used to build the above chart are available in a CSV file, but as noted above they should not be treated as authoritative — refer to the figures on the sca.org website for greater specificity.
A few thoughts to consider membership numbers, I think it’s too early to tell how much the SCA will bounce back after the initial COVID pandemic. I know just in this year of 2024 after my partner got COVID from going to an indoor event and then passing it to me we have both not attended some events to avoid getting COVID again. I’m sure their are people who have let their memberships lapse because they are still not wanting to be exposed to COVID at events. Secondly, I’m amazed at the number of people I run into at events that are brand new, last year at Pennsic the number of newbies was surprising. The backside of that is I’m even more amazed at the number of people who are peers who no longer maintain a membership but regularly attend events. Last summer when I was reconciling the gate sign-in sheets at a well attended event I counted 2 long standing peers and 2 new peers that paid the NMS. I thought that was very odd. How many people who hold awards or peerages are no longer members but still go to events? There is nothing to stop them from going to peerages circles and voicing their opinion. Do most kingdoms require a participant to be a member to obtain a peerage or is it just encouraged? I know to fight in crown one has to be a current member. I would think if determining candidates in a peerage circle one should be required to be a current member if you’re an active peer. Would peerage membership requirements be different in each kingdom or would that be a society level requirement if it even is one.