Participation

[Taybank]

I have just got our copy of the annual report.
I feel the statistics on page 3 are not complete in that they do not include the number of participations (if that is the right word) per member.
With 174,065 outings by members and 11,000 members, that amounts to around 16 events per member during the year. Is that good or is that bad? Personally, I don't think that's good especially when there seems to be a larger number of local events these days.
Are we beefing up member numbers for obvious very good reasons while many of them are competing but rarely? Are some newcomers joining for the activity side while not getting out and competing? Or is it due to the off-season, bad weather, and holidays taking effect?
I do however feel that it should be a point put forward for our consideration along with the other statistics and that answers should be sought.

[SeanC]

I'm not sure if that statistic tells us much at a national level. At a club level it might be more revealing.

Since putting on more local events we've had a few more people join us, but many have other sports/hobbies, weekend work committments, conflicting family committments etc and for these sorts of people 16 runs per year is rather high. 5-10 a more realistic target. Putting on more local events and activities may reach this occasional orienteers market and perhaps counter-intuitively might drop the numbers of runs per member.

Since there must be many members who only orienteer a handful of times a year, this implies that there are people orienteering 100+ days a year... any therapy available for this addiction?

[roadrunner]

Are some newcomers joining for the activity side while not getting out and competing?

There's the other side too - former regular orienteers who, for various reasons, only participate infrequently nowadays but choose to remain as members.

[madmike]

this implies that there are people orienteering 100+ days a year...

There are actually people who orienteer less than 100 days per year - what are they thinking

[EddieH]

16 runs per member. I am amazed it's that high seeing as there is a general rule in everything that 70% of people do 30%of the activity and vice versa.

The majority of people that join almost anything you care to think of are never active. Check your membership list - have you ever met or seen evidence of half of them?

[SeanC]

Do the participation figures include non-members?

[Adrian]

Attendance at HOC events in 2011 was 3527, spread over 41 events. There were 234 members.

[Paul Frost]

Check your membership list - have you ever met or seen evidence of half of them?

About 90% of EckO members will be at our club training weekend away at the end of this week.
I would also expect to see about 80-90% of them at every local event.

[Paul Frost]

Are some newcomers joining for the activity side while not getting out and competing?

I get the impression that that is the primary aim of "Community O", and that competition is not part of the plan.

[SeanC]

Paul - you have made that observation several times, but it's definately not true. From my experience the coaches who run these try and move people who started at clubnights into mainstream orienteering.... and of course many of the participants started orienteering at events and are using clubnights as coaching, to get the skills needed to keep them in the sport.

[Paul Frost]

It's because that's the impression I get from talking to various people with experience of community O, and the fact that some of these clubs don't even use the word orienteering in their description.

I would like to see some statistics showing the number of average attendees at these sessions, how many of those go on to be paying members of British Orienteering and how many of them have competed in at least 3 normal orienteering events.

It would also be interesting to know how many of these projects will be self financing when the large amount of money that is being poured into them stops. After being paid for 2 years I'm not sure how many session leaders will continue as a volunteer.

There is a lot of money and time being spent on this area and not much in the way of hard statistics to show how effective it is in creating new orienteers. But I guess that the definition of an orienteer may be changing as a result of this initiative but that's another story.

[Gross]

how many of them have competed in at least 3 normal orienteering events.

That rules out Urban O & Shopping Centre O then

[Spookster]

Do the participation figures include non-members?

Yes they do, but not the participation figure Taybank is quoting above, which is the participation by people who are members.

The annual report containing the data is here.

I guess a minority of the members are responsible for the majority of the participation. If it was 30% of the members responsible for 70% of all runs, that would be a average of 37 events a year for that group. Sounds about right.

[greywolf]

The majority of people that join almost anything you care to think of are never active. Check your membership list - have you ever met or seen evidence of half of them?

The majority (i.e. more than half) of the 11,000 BOF members orienteer. 5348 individuals (i.e. almost half) are on the rankings list so completed a rankings event - but this doesn't include a substantial number of under 16s and those who only went to local events

[DavidJ]

Also on Page 3 is the data on membership. The text states membership for 2010 was 10,761 rising to 11,005 in 2011. Now look at the plotted data and estimate the value of the 2010 point. About 10,200? I expect it was just a data entry problem but it does make the increase seem rather more significant than it actually is.

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