Scouting America (nee Boy Scouts of America) will likely have a large 2024 youth-membership loss. It’s likely due to its new rolling-membership scheme.
By December 31, 2024, BSA SA will likely have a 2.4% member loss. If nothing changes, it will reach 14% by April 2025!
SA could have avoided this with a subscription model.
(Important data note: All member counts in this document are of youth members. Adults are not represented in any counts.)
What’s changed
On August 1, 2023, SA switched from a fixed-membership scheme1 to a rolling-membership scheme (what these mean).
While rolling memberships are a conceptual improvement, renewals appear to be shockingly low.
The old way: fixed memberships
In the old, fixed-membership system, well-run Scout units reached out to all members to secure renewals. Paying for renewal was easy.
Let’s use Cub Scout Pack 123 as an example.
Each year, Pack 123 pays $100 to renew its charter. The charter is a license for the pack to operate. Renewing this charter is called “rechartering”.
Most unit charters expire on December 31. Therefore, by December 31, Pack 123 must pay for the next year.
All Pack 123 members have their own SA memberships. When Pack 123 recharters, in addition to paying its own $100 fee, it pays SA annual membership fees to behalf of its members.
Suppose Pack 123 has 20 youth members and 10 adult members. The pack will pay SA $24502 for next year’s memberships:
- $100: Pack 123’s annual-charter fee
- $1700: SA’s $85 fee for each of Pack 123’s 20 youth members
- $650: SA’s $65 fee for each of Pack 123’s 10 adult leaders
As wise stewards of limited funds, Pack 123 prefers not to pay SA’s fee for youth or adults who stopped participating. Therefore, before paying $2450, a Pack 123 volunteer reached out to all families to assure they are renewing and to collect funds.
Also, a Pack 123 volunteer managed the friction of dealing with SA’s burdensome recharter process. Families did not deal with that burden. They only needed to send a payment to Pack 123. Easy.
A detail: New members had prorated memberships. Sally Smith, who is new to SA, joined Pack 123 in September, 2022. Since Pack 123’s charter cycle begins on January 1, Sally only paid for four months of SA membership: September 2022 through December 2022. When Pack 123 submitted its recharter, it paid $85 on Sally’s behalf for her 2023 SA membership.
The new way: rolling memberships
On August 1, 2023, SA switched to a rolling-membership model. All new members pay a full year upon joining. Their memberships expire next year, on the last day of their join month.
Suppose Timmy Smith joined Pack 123 on September 15, 2023. His SA membership renewal is due September 30, 2024.
SA disconnected individual memberships from the unit-recharter process. When Pack 123 recharters, it no longer manages Timmy’s annual SA membership. Instead, by the time Pack 123 starts thinking about its January 1 renewal, Timmy is not on their minds. Since Timmy’s membership expired on September 30, Timmy’s parents should have already renewed his SA membership through SA’s website.
Problem 1: SA removed a crucial touch point
In the old system, Pack 123 contacted all families regarding SA-membership renewal.
The new system breaks this personal touch. Since Timmy’s SA-membership renewal is divorced from Pack 123’s recharter, Pack 123 no longer needs to reach out to Timmy’s family regarding renewal.
Problem 2: Burdening parents
Parents now directly deal with SA’s processes.
SA’s main objective is to get parents to toss $85 over the fence once a year.
SA makes this hard. The main problem is red tape. Online renewal requires parents to digitally sign a thick, 1,197-word document! It takes around 9 minutes to read: while 1,197 words have a baseline estimate of 6 minutes to read3, this document will take longer:
- It is written poorly, at a “difficult to read”level4.
- It has formatting problems.
I am estimating 50% longer due to re-reads of difficult sentences or pauses to comprehend. That means 9 minutes to read the document.
Also, I imagine for most parents, logging into a SA system is a rare event, possibly only for each annual renewal. A once-every-year system will induce friction simply because each year, the parent has to re-learn it and possibly go through the password-reset exercise. I estimate this will induce 5 more minutes of delays.
Beyond remembering how to log in and reading the agreement, I estimate 5 more minutes to navigate the form start to end.
5 + 9 + 5 = 19 minutes! SA is asking parents to go through a 19-minute, bureaucratic exercise just for the privilege of throwing $85 at SA!
Families are rejecting this burden. Below I show how a shocking percent of rolling memberships are not being renewed!
Considerations for how 2024 may end up
This section is insufferably boring. Sane people may wish to skip to the next major section.
We can use December 16, 2024’s numbers to predict how 2024 will end up. On that day, SA had 1,007,482 youth members5, falling into these categories:
“Lapsed” means a membership that recently expired. SA includes lapsed members in its membership counts. More on this later.
First, we need to talk nerdy.
Limitations on predictors
I prefer to use several years’ data to guide predictions. For SA, I only feel comfortable using 2022 and 2023 as predictors.
SA’s annual cycles have had recent disruptions:
- 2019: This was the last year that the Mormons ran Scout units. Nearly all their units fizzled on January 1, 2020, removing about 1/3 of SA’s youth.
- 2020: The COVID pandemic decimated SA’s ability to recruit and retain, causing another 1/3 membership loss.
- 2021: More of a pandemic-emergence phase, this is an abnormal year.
In addition to major shifts in numbers, these disruptions changed how new members appear in the annual cycle. Most new SA youth join in the fall, part of grade-based cohorts. Mormons instead used age, so join dates for their youth were distributed across the whole year. We no longer have this effect.
Even if the above reasons are insufficient to avoid using years before 2022, I further theorize that the pandemic shifted society’s approach to youth programs. That should also be evaluated before adding pre-2022 predictors.
Lapsing: an explainer
SA’s recharter process is burdensome. This is why many units are late on rechartering.
In the old, fixed-membership model, a unit being late with its recharter means it’s also late on paying SA’s annual fee for each of its members. Nominally, a late recharter means a unit has to stop operating and that all its people have expired SA memberships.
Enter “lapsing”: This is where SA gives expired units and their members a two-month grace period (it’s now longer–more later). Lapsed units and members are still treated as active. They can still participate in all Scouting activities.
Units must resolve their charters within that two-month lapsed period. On the first day of the third month, lapsed units and members become dropped. That is when non-renewed units must stop operating and when the individual memberships are expired.
Annual cycles
Most units’ charter cycle begins January 1. In the fixed-membership system, the vast majority of lapses also happened on January 1, due to late recharters.
This had some predictable effects on youth memberships:
- December 31’s membership number approximated an annual high-water mark.
- January 1 brings a surge of lapses, partly fueled by late unit recharters.
- By March 1, all these January 1 lapses had converted to paid renewals or drops. That approximated SA’s annual low-water mark.
Relevant 2022 and 2023 data:
| Milestone | 2022 | 2023 |
| Dec. 31 youth membership count | 1,042,860 | 1,015,028 |
| March 318 (next year) membership count (after the Jan. 1 lapses converted to renewals or drops) | 792,908 (March 31, 2023) | 805,209 (March 31, 2024) |
| Change from December peak to March valley | -249,952 | -209,819 |
| % change from December peak to March valley | -24.0% | -20.7% |
We can use means of 2022 and 2023 numbers as predictors. Had we continued with the fixed-membership model, we may expect to drop 230,000 youth in the spring. That is about 22.4% of the Dec. 31 membership number. (Math note: Below, I will use 230,000 to predict expected drops for 2024 and use 22.4% when I need to estimate drops from subsets.)
Expected drops for Aug. – Sept. 2023 new youth
New youth who joined on or after August 1, 2023 are on SA’s new rolling-membership model. These youth are especially important for predicting how 2024 will end up.
Here’s our 2023 new youth for SA’s key growth months:
- August 2023: 31,4429 (expires Aug. 31, 2024)
- September 2023: 75,104 (expires Sept. 30, 2024)
- October 2023: 53,225 (expires Oct. 31, 2024)
- Total (Aug. – Oct. 2023): 159771
Using our 22.4% predictor of drops, 35,779 of these new youth will drop.
The real drop number is much worse.
Aside: Do new youth drop at the same rate?
Nearly all youth who joined on the rolling-membership scheme–starting August 1, 2023–will be new youth; few will be dropped youth who rejoin.10 Therefore, the first wave of rolling-renewal drops will be almost entirely of youth in their first year of SA.
The 22.4% drop rate applies to all youth, both new and renewing youth. Is that the right number if we’re only assessing drops for new youth?
The number of members in SA, categorized by age, increases through age 9, and most recruitment happens in early years:
The combination of these factors suggests low drop rates for young new youth.
However, the drop rate is not 0.
As a Cubmaster of a huge, successful pack, I saw attrition from new youth after their initial, prorated-membership period. I roughly recall it being 10% – 20%. While I don’t have broader data, I assume this is a general phenomenon.
When I was District Commissioner, my PDS-score11-addled District Executives kept starting new units that quickly flopped. This inflated the new-youth counts.
I further theorize that retention is poorer the older new recruits are, especially with new Scouts BSA recruits12, which further increases the new-youth drop percent.
Also, with how the rolling-membership scheme forces everyone to prepay for a year upfront, those who quit quickly after joining can no longer be represented in the data.
The data is messier than I prefer. While it is possible that the new-youth drop rate may be different than 22.4%, I theorize that it’s close, and I lack a basis to use a different number. While I am open to an update here, unless the correct figure is tremendously different than this estimate, it won’t have a major impact on this article’s major findings.
Fall 2024’s actual numbers
A detail: SA increased lapsed period 50%
First, a crucial detail that will be relevant later: SA recently increased its lapsed period 50%, from two months to three months. I think that change was made in October 2024 or November 2024.
With the old, two-month lapsed period, Sept. 2023’s non-renewing, new members become lapses on Oct. 1 and drops on Dec. 1. By increasing the lapsed period 50%, Sept. 2023’s lapses don’t become drops until Jan. 1, 2025.
Did you see that? SA shifted the peak recruitment month’s drops–September 2023’s drops–into 2025!
Below I’ll share how shockingly few rolling-membership youth are renewing. It seems odd that national’s new lapsing scheme causes its December 31 to include 100% of who joined in 2023’s peak membership month, even though few are renewing.
The numbers are scary
Let’s review retention of new youth we added in our peak 2023 recruitment months: August, September, and October. They are the first batch of members who will renew rolling memberships in 2024.13
SA’s November 30, 2024 number of lapsed youth will only include those whose memberships expired on Aug. 31, Sept. 30, or Oct. 31. In other words, it accounts for all members in the first three months of the new, rolling-membership scheme!
The bottom number in the first column will help us get there:
This means 153,405 lapses are attributable to memberships expiring in August, September, and October. (July’s lapsed memberships are already washed out of this number, having converted to drops on Nov. 1.)
But these are not just rolling-membership lapses!
While most units appear to renew on December 31, some renew on other months. Therefore, late recharters will trigger lapses of fixed-membership youth in all months of the year. That is the 19,37914 number on the second column–the lapses we had in November 2023. We should expect similar numbers for 2024, so I will just subtract 19,379 from 153,405, yielding 134,026 excess lapses (84% of the 159,771 new Scouts in Aug. – Oct. 2023) attributable to the rolling-membership system.
A detail: This Nov. 30 number is favorable to SA. SA had one to three months to convert all non-renewed August, September, and October lapses to paid renewals.
Wait, lapses aren’t drops!
Above, I gave numbers for new Aug. – Oct. 2023 youth from different dimensions:
- 35,779 anticipated drops
- 134,026 estimated lapses
Recall that lapsing is a grace period before a drop. Some lapsed members pay to resume their membership. All others are dropped.
It is my understanding that someone emerges from the lapsed category in one of two ways:
- immediately, by paying for a membership
- when the clock strikes midnight at the end of the last day of a month, when the lapsed member becomes dropped
Therefore, members removed from the lapsed category during the month indicate renewals. We can estimate how many lapsed members renewed in a month by comparing the beginning and end of a month:
- November 1, 2024 lapsed-member count: 160,60715
- November 30, 2024 lapsed-member count: 153,405
This means SA can convert 7,202 lapsed members to paid renewals in a month. To be fair, November included Thanksgiving, which is often a dead week for families. Let’s be generous and round up to 8,000 lapsed-member recoveries a month.16 Compared to the November start of 160,607 lapses, SA’s conversion of lapses to paid memberships is 5.0% per month.
Now I need to construct a model to translate lapses into expected drops.
We can calculate the percent contribution that Aug. – Oct. 2023 made to the 159,771 total new youth membership in that period:
- August 2023: 31,442 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 20%
- September 2023: 75,104 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 47%
- October 2023: 53,225 new members ÷ 159,771 total = 33%
Using all this, I can create a rough estimate for what drops we should expect. This is a rough estimate because the Nov. 30 lapse count–my starting point for this calculation–represents 3 months of trying to renew August lapses, 2 months of trying to renew September lapses, and 1 month of trying to renew October lapses, so each month’s contribution to that lapsed-member count has shifted from its contribution to total members. However, given a 5% monthly reduction in lapses–a small number to begin with–the distortion will be of a low magnitude. I do not see a way of untangling these numbers with the reports available to my source, so my inability to tease that out is an acknowledged source of error, albeit an error that is small compared to the big numbers it’s being compared to.
Starting with the Nov. 30, 2024 new-member lapse count of 134,026:
- December 1: August’s share of the Nov. 30 count, 20%, will convert to 26,805 drops.17 The remainder, 107,221 lapses attributable to September and October, will continue in December.
- December 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the December 1 number to reduce to 101,860.
- January 1: September 2023’s share of remaining lapses (59%18), 60,097, convert to drops. The remainder, 41,763 lapses attributable to October, continue in January.
- January 31: The monthly 5% reduction will cause the January 1 lapsed number to reduce to 39,675.
- February 1: All that’s left are October 2023’s remaining lapses that weren’t converted, 39,675. All these convert to drops.
The sum of drops are 25,465 + 60,445 + 40,553 = 126,577.
Here’s what’s alarming: drops represent 79% of the new youth from August, September, and October 2023!
Drops for rolling-membership youth are 253% higher than the expected 35,779!
Predicting end-of-year 2024 numbers
We can predict end-of-year numbers for 2024 by summing these:
- Dec. 16’s youth count19
- Expected new members for December
Expected additional, new December youth
Here’s past growth for Decembers20:
- December 2022 new members: 30,597
- December 2023 new members: 23,499
Using the mean, we should expect 27,048 new members for December 2024.
Above, I shared a member count as of December 16. As of that day, 15 days were left in December, or 48%. Therefore, I will scale this predictor of new members down by 52%, arriving at an expected gain of 12,983 members between December 16, 2024 and December 31, 2024. This predicted gain is likely to overstate SA’s true gain in this period as the last several days of December are holidays or travel seasons.
Projected December 31, 2024 youth count
1,007,482 (December 16 youth count) + 12,983 (expected new-youth growth for remainder of December) = 1,020,465 youth members on December 31.
Superficially, that’s a 0.5% increase from 2023’s 1,015,028 count. But it’s inflated.
December 31, 2024’s number inflates member count
The December 31, 2024 number will indicate on-paper retention for 100% of new youth from September 2023 – December 2024. This inflates the numbers!
Remember Sally, who above joined in September 2022 under the prior, fixed-membership scheme? Her twin Oscar also joined at the same time. In November 2022, Oscar decided that Scouting is not right for him, so he quit.
Because Oscar quit before Pack 123 requested everyone’s fee for 2023, Oscar’s 2023 membership fee was not paid.21 Therefore, Oscar counts towards SA’s December 31, 2022 number but not SA’s December 31, 2023 number.
Sally’s friend Rebecca joined in September 2023, after the start of the rolling-membership model. That means Rebecca’s parents paid for a year of membership upfront. Rebecca’s membership expires the end of September 2024.
By November 2023, Rebecca decided Scouting is not right for her. She quits. Remember that Rebecca’s membership goes through September 30, 2024. Her lapsed period lasts until January 1, 2025. Therefore, even though Rebecca quit Scouts in November 2023, she counts towards the December 31, 2023 and December 31, 2024 numbers!
See the difference? Even though Oscar and Rebecca joined in September and quit two months later:
- Oscar, who joined under the fixed-membership scheme, only contributed to SA’s member count for his join year.
- Rebecca, who joined under the rolling-membership scheme, contributed to SA’s member count for her join year and the following year.
2024 is that “following year” for all who joined in the first few months of the rolling-membership system: Aug. 1 – Dec. 31, 2023! Therefore, SA’s December 31, 2024 number is inflated when compared to prior years!
If we are to do an apples-to-apples comparison–exclude those who joined after August 1, 2023 but quit before they would have paid for 2024 under the old system–then December 31, 2024’s number, the high-water mark, must be lower.
We can estimate that! From the 1,020,465 Scouts, subtract the 22.4% estimated drops from the fall 2023 rolling-renewal growth. That nominally means you’d remove anticipated drops from everyone who joined between August 1, 2023 and December 31, 2023.
Before we do the math, a few exceptions:
- For those who joined in August 2023, their non-renewed lapses became drops on December 1, 2024. Therefore, they are already removed from our numbers.
- In the old system, I believe that those joining for two or fewer months before their unit’s recharter date had to purchase membership through the end of the following recharter period. As most units’ charter cycles start January 1, this usually affected only November and December joins. For example, someone joining in November 2022 would typically pay 14 months, taking that person through the end of 2023. Therefore, such people, even in the old system, appeared in their join year’s count and in their next year’s count. In the interest of an apples-to-apples comparison, I will not deduct any Scouts who joined in November 2023 and December 2023.
I therefore will only use September 2023 and October 2023 for this calculation.
- September 2023 + October 2023 new members = 128,328
- Expected drops from that pool in the old system: 22.4% of 128,328, which is 28,745.
Subtract the estimated drops from the end-of-2024 estimate, and you get 1,020,465 – 28,745 = 991,720 members on December 31, a year-over-year drop of 2.2%! (Note: In addition for being a more realistic number, this also corrects for the distortion caused by increasing the lapsed period to three months.)
But wait, there’s less!
The December 31 number omits a crucial part of the story. Given high non-renewals of rolling-scheme members, our spring low-water mark is likely to be far worse than last year.
The real story comes after the January 1 lapse surge works out. This surge is induced by two longstanding factors:
- Late recharters causing lapsed memberships. Typically, most youth in a unit renew, so most of these convert to paid memberships once units submit late charters.
- Members who were non-renewed by their units, typically because the person quit SA.
Per numbers shared above, if this was a pre-rolling-scheme year, the January 1 lapse surge would land on about 230,000 drops. After our spring lapse surge is completed, we would have 1,020,46522 – 230,000 = 790,465 members.
But it will be much worse. When 79% of rolling-membership youth are not renewing their SA membership, you’re going to take a bath! We need to figure out the rolling-renewal members’ contribution to the total-membership picture, then adjust the expected spring drops to reflect the far higher rate of renewals of rolling-membership youth.
August 2023’s lapses converted to drops on December 1, so they are already flushed out. That means we need to add up the new members from September, October, November, and December 2023 and figure out their contribution to drops. The counts of those new members are:
- September 2023: 75,104 (you saw this same number above)
- October 2023: 53,225 (you saw this same number above)
- November 2023: 26,632
- December 2023: 23,499
- Total: 178,460, which is 18% of the 1,015,028 total from December 31, 2024
The 82% who are not part of the Sept. – Dec. 2023 cohort will drop at the expected rate. We need to scale the 230,000 expected drops down to 82%, resulting in 188,600 drops from all those who didn’t join in Sept. – Dec. 2023.
Oops, remember that I wrote that August’s drops are washed out already? That means the new-as-of-August 2023 people, who renewed (not quitting), are still in the big number. Therefore, the estimated 188,600 drops inadvertently includes 22.4% of these not-quitting August 2023 people! Let’s add them back. August 2023 brought us 31,442 new Scouts. Earlier I projected that 26,805 of them dropped, leaving us with 4,637 who will remain. Let’s add 22.4% of them back, or 1,039, so our 188,600 drop number declines a little to 187,561.
I estimated that rolling-renewal members are dropping a 79% rate. Of the 178,460 who joined Sept. – Dec. 2023, 140,983 will drop.
Add them up, we expect to see 187,561 + 140,983 = 328,544 drops by April 1, 2025. That means SA’s low-water mark for 2025 is only 691,921, or 14% fewer than 2024’s low-water mark!
All are now on rolling memberships
To avoid muddying waters, I characterized SA members that first joined before August 1, 2023 as still being on the fixed-membership scheme.
There is no more fixed-membership scheme. All members are on the rolling-membership scheme. Those who joined before August 1, 2023 have membership periods that coincide with the charter cycle of their Scout unit.
These members can now pay for annual membership directly to SA. As long as their Scout unit is willing, they can instead continue as if the old model was still effective by paying their Scout unit, and the unit remits the annual SA fee on their behalf.
How SA can fix this
Get the members back
Nothing has changed about the Scouting program that would cause non-renewals to surge to 79%. It’s hard to pin that on anything but the rolling-renewal scheme.
How do we get these Scouts back? My son’s membership expires on December 31. I’ve intentionally allowed it to not renew to see what kinds of contacts I get. So far, it has just been a single, easily missed email on November 1! National isn’t even trying.
Are gold loopers yet again asleep at the wheel? (I know that many in Irving are not asleep at the wheel and are genuinely concerned about this. They are hamstrung by how SA’s bureaucracy resembles a patronage system, causing employees and volunteers to be promoted far beyond their Peter-principle limit, so people with poor performance and bad ideas have outsized influence in Irving.)
We should have had a higher renewal rate than 21%! What are we doing to gain conversions back to renewals?23
Add a subscription model
It beggars belief that a subscription model wasn’t done from the start. Monthly bills are as American as apple pie. Internet, cell phone, Spotify, Netflix, rent or mortgage payments, etc., monthly payments are ubiquitous! It is unusual for a service to have a one-time fee!
Why did SA not see this? A subscription model removes the barriers of the annual-renewal blunder! Once you join, you begin paying $7 a month ($84 a year). This is on autopilot until you decide to quit. What this means:
- The lack of an annual touch point will not induce expiring memberships.
- The family’s administrative burden is resolved upon joining, a process all new families already suffer through.
While not an objective of a subscription model, SA may enjoy enhanced revenue from non-participating members who, due to the set-and-forget nature of monthly subscriptions, do not cancel the payments when they quit Scouting.
While some fear the revenue effect of families canceling their memberships, I find that fear to be misplaced. Even in the old system, a great number of youth dropped in their prorated period, denying SA the next year’s membership revenue. And if I had to make a choice, I’ll take the risk of less predictable cancellations over the 79% drop rate the annual system caused!
Fix the annual-renewal form
While I think we need to pivot from annual renewals, some will prefer that over a subscription model, so this still needs improvement.
The form is too hard! It needs to get as close to a click-and-submit form as possible.
It starts with trashing that dumbass, 1,197 word document. The way that dumbass document was written, and the idea that parents must sign it, is contemptuous of the base. If Irving bureaucrats cared about the base, they would never shove such a long, thick dumbass document into an ordinary transaction. And the fact that we are expected to sign such a detailed, dumbass document clearly shows a national office so arrogant, it believes we are so misaligned with its goals that it’s entitled to shove our noses in its goals annually.
E.g., why does national include the excerpt from the Declaration of Religious Principle in its bloated, dumbass document? Because despite that most SA members are Christian–in practice or culture–SA insists on its members mocking Jesus, and it needs to remind us that we are bound to this mockery.
Come on, Irving bureaucrats, a renewing member does not need to sign your dumbass document!
Beyond that, there are other improvements that could be made. For example, the email notice should have had a unique link that takes one to a click-and-submit form, pre-authenticated for that member, that needs little info beyond the credit card number!
- While SA’s prior membership scheme was a fixed-membership model, SA offered prorated memberships to new members, providing them membership through the end of the fixed-membership cycle that they joined in. Not long before the start of the next membership cycle, the new members would pay for a full year’s membership. ↩︎
- This does not include local-council fees, which vary and can be hefty. ↩︎
- In How to Determine Average Reading Time, the Public Relations Society of America recommends Roy Peter Clark‘s method for estimating time-to-read: divide the word count by 200. ↩︎
- This document’s reading-ease score is only 42.8, which is considered “difficult” per How to Write Plain English by the University of Canterbury. ↩︎
- This number, and all other numbers in this report (unless otherwise indicated), come from SA’s “summary” dashboard. ↩︎
- Calculated by getting youth count using SA’s default filter but unchecking any lapsed membership categories. The remaining default- filter membership categories include “CrossOver, paid”, “Member Without a Unit”, “Multiple”, “New, multiple”, “New, paid”, “ReRegistered, multiple”, “ReRegistered, paid”, “Transfer In, paid”, and “Transfer, multiple”. Note that the report being used appears to have already filtered out some of these types. E.g., deselecting any of the “multiple” types has no effect on the count. ↩︎
- Calculated by filtering to membership types that are lapsed. ↩︎
- When you select a [Month] [Year] report in SA’s reporting system for the Month Year field, you are getting a report for the last day of that month. The only exception is when Current Month is selected, you are getting the data as of the day the data is viewed; that is how I got data for days other than the last day of a month. ↩︎
- These number come from a different dashboard.
If using the “summary” dashboard, these numbers come from a field that purportedly is cumulative. In theory, to get August 2023’s new-member growth, you subtract the August 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – Aug. 31) from the July 2023 report’s number (total for Jan. 1 – July 31) while filtering the report to “New, paid” youth memberships.
However, on closer inspection, there is an anomaly: January 2023’s new-youth number is 95,385, and February 2023’s number is 79,111. A cumulative field won’t have a month-over-month decline!
It was later discovered that the new-member stats shared by SA officials match those on a different dashboard that shows registration status by month, filtered to “new, paid”. I will therefore use that other dashboard for new-youth data. ↩︎ - In my experience, it is rare for dropped youth to rejoin the program. ↩︎
- PDS scores are part of SA’s hazing ritual for District Executives (DEs). This scoring system emphasizes goosing current-year numbers with little regard for future sustainability. Setting up new units, and, when feasible, obscuring true program costs with donor funds, appears to inordinately help PDS scores, but whether the units are around in the future hardly matters: short DE tenures, institutional silos, and an obsolete model for commissioner service makes it difficult to have great success with these new units, especially outside of areas experiencing natural growth of families with Scouting-friendly demographics. ↩︎
- Scouts BSA is a middle-school program. I therefore expect high rates of attrition for new, older middle schoolers, who are joining a program they will quickly outgrow, or for high schoolers, who are infantilized by a program designed for the prior age cohort. ↩︎
- While true in the big picture, SA’s numbers suggest a very small number of members may have been on the rolling-renewal system in the year or so before August 1, 2023. I suspect these were test users. ↩︎
- I think the 2024 number will actually be lower than this as some of the fixed-membership lapses are displaced by new, rolling-scheme members whose membership periods coincide with their unit’s charter period. Still, I have no better number than the 2023 number, and as that number likely modestly overstates the fixed-membership lapses, it bends my math in SA’s favor. ↩︎
- This number was obtained by visiting the summary dashboard on this day. Otherwise, when selecting a month and a year of any prior month, the user gets a figure for the last day of that month. ↩︎
- I used 29 as the denominator. The difference between Nov. 1 and 30 is 29 days. ↩︎
- Small, potential source of error: This probably does not include conversions that occurred on November 30. I think they show in the December 1 numbers. However, November 30, 2024 is a Saturday in a long, holiday weekend, so I doubt there is any movement. ↩︎
- 59% comes from dividing September 2023’s new members by the sum of September 2023 and October 2023 new members. ↩︎
- Recall that SA includes lapsed members in its total-youth count. All as-of-Dec. 16 lapsed members stay on the roll through the end of the month. While conversions of lapsed members back to paid are good, they don’t change the end-of-month number. ↩︎
- As with the previous new-member numbers, these come from the dashboard that shows registration status by month. ↩︎
- In that year, Oscar became lapsed on January 1, 2023 and dropped on March 1, 2023. ↩︎
- Here, I went back to the end-of-2024 number that I called inflated. The adjusted number that I calculated later was to provide an apples-to-apples comparison to contrived numbers from prior years. The “inflated” number is my prediction of a point-in-time count in the current system, so it the correct one to use for projections for the spring. ↩︎
- There appears to be a piecemeal measures being enacted or considered, but I need to maintain confidentiality. SA, you need to be public and open about your strategy! ↩︎
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