The report tells us on p6 we have 8953 members (57% male, 43% female).
p21 shows us a graph which is probably more helpful to understand the trend: the green line for total members seems to accord with the 8953 number, but the blue line comes to less than 3000, and the pink to about 2000 - less than 5K in total! Oddly we seem unable to determine how many male members we had before 2020 despite knowing how many female. More confusingly still the Junior and Senior members add up to be more than the total! What I THINK has happened is the legend is screwed up - Orange and Blue represent M and F respectively and Yellow and Pink represent senior and junior?
Presumably this report has been through the board and various members of staff at BOF and none of them have asked the question, "what is this graph telling me?"
Its very difficult from the report to get a feel for the "state of the nation" from it even without such errors:
- the ethnicity data adds up to 7118 not the full membership... presumably because a fairly significant portion didn't answer the question. If you've got about 20% of people who you don't know the answer for, providing analysis for 1% of members who are not white - without commenting on the 20% unknown seems misleading. It also appears they've treated everyone who said anything except "white british" as "other" and "white british = white" in the pie chart; that might tell us something about why there is a problem! How does that compare for our age demographic, and in particular our age demographic who are active in sport?
- they've devoted 1/4 of a page to tell us that 14% of the members have a health condition. Is that large or small compared to the population as a whole? the demographic we have? other sports?
- they devoted 1/4 of two separate pages (6 and 20) to tell us there were 150K ~ "runs" but don't tell the trend there; the member/non-member pie chart similarly gives as 2023 but no idea of the change.
- to understand the trends I have to look at previous years annual reports:
- membership is the highest its been since Covid
- we have almost recovered to pre-covid levels, and certainly to where the pre-2018 trend was taking us in terms of "runs"
- non-member runs might not be back to where they were pre-covid? (before anyone jumps on a "that's the extra levy" bandwagon - this data is all before that change).
- comparing the demographic distribution is hard as the latest report uses 10 year bins rather than 5 yr bins in 2022; a simple average is probably not the most useful metric as we clearly have two distributions - juniors and seniors but it is noteworthy that the average has been 47 in 2021, 2022, 2023 - does that mean we are managing to slow the demographic aging? A brief commentary on the ages of new members, and perhaps those who don't renew might be helpful.
It is a bit worrying that this is allegedly the issue troubling the long-term future sustainability of the sport the most and the quality of the analysis seems to be things that would rile a GCSE maths teacher! The treasurer refers to three tables, only 2 of which are in the report. The third one might be particularly interesting to those in Scotland where they won't benefit directly from the BOF Sports Council grants - the others would be much more readable if they contained a consistent number of decimal places - especially with the aging demographic!
Am I a pedant? Probably - but I think it's really important that we find a way to clearly communicate the challenges the sport / BOF face and obviously someone had time to improve the visual styling of the report but seems to have missed a rather important point about its accuracy and substance.
