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Thanks for your work in making this table; I had been flicking my head up and down the CFC page, comparing 2013 with 2014.
The only stat I pay much attention to is "ordinary adult members". Juniors are a flow thru, life members are with us whether they are involved with chess or not, and honoraries may bring us honor, but not much else.
However, the ordinary adult members are down by 10% across the country, with no province reporting an increase. Can it really be that, outside of Ontario and Quebec, there are only 380 adults who are CFC members? This is not great news at all.
The only stat I pay much attention to is "ordinary adult members". Juniors are a flow thru, life members are with us whether they are involved with chess or not, and honoraries may bring us honor, but not much else.
I'm a correspondence chess honorary member. Have been since around 1980. I don't know how it is with others, however, I've always tried to accommodate the CCCA when they needed someone for one of the international teams and I send donations from time to time. I don't play anymore because my game has deteriorated with age but I still try to send donations from time to time.
The only stat I pay much attention to is "ordinary adult members". Juniors are a flow thru
And here lies the problem. We were all junior players at one point. If were were able to retain more of the juniors, we would have better adult numbers.
I get that when one finishes high school other aspects of life take priority. However, at some point one has the opportunity to come back to chess. Why don't they?
I get that when one finishes high school other aspects of life take priority.
Garland, it is actually when they start high school.
There is a huge dropout rate at age 14. Kids are starting high school, discovering girls etc.
The question I pose to all you math and stats wizards is this:
How many juniors do we need to nurture to create one active adult CFC member?
What is the conversion ratio? Are we doing enough to maintain (or grow) our numbers in the long run?
I have been running chess tournaments for juniors for many years. High school participation has always been very low, and I finally decided it wasn't worth my time. If kids would rather emulate Justin Bieber than me there is probably no hope for them. Following a request from a teacher, this year I included high school students again.
Garland, it is actually when they start high school.
There is a huge dropout rate at age 14. Kids are starting high school, discovering girls etc.
The question I pose to all you math and stats wizards is this:
How many juniors do we need to nurture to create one active adult CFC member?
What is the conversion ratio? Are we doing enough to maintain (or grow) our numbers in the long run?
If the CFC were to go on Shark Tank (or in Canada, Dragons' Den) and ask for investment, the one question that MUST be answered would be:
"What is your cost of customer acquisition?"
Failure to answer the question with up-to-the-minute numbers would result in Kevin O'Leary saying: "You're dead to me." The other potential investors would agree that the CFC doesn't deserve to be supported.
If the true customer is indeed considered to be the adult player, then this is basically Bob's question "How many juniors do we need to nurture to create one active adult CFC member?" In effect, nurturing these juniors is like a VC firm funding a startup, and hoping the startup becomes a 1-in-100 megacompany.
But there is another question besides the one on juniors: "What does the CFC need to do, and how much does it cost, to attract and maintain a new adult member who never joined the CFC as a child or a junior?" I was one of those people. I stayed with the CFC for maybe 6 years, then I left it and have never returned not just to the CFC, but to organized chess.
Adults who didn't play chess as kids or juniors know they will never win anything substantial in organized chess. Yet somehow the CFC must convince them to play RATED tournaments (so the CFC can collect not just membership dues, but ratings fees). These rated tournaments generally take up an entire weekend, and often it's the long weekends when the major tournaments take place. That's a huge sacrifice for someone who only occassionally played chess growing up and now has a family or maybe friends who are into weekend camping, hunting, fishing, or maybe into sports like tennis, golf, hockey, softball. What the CFC is faced with is a VERY limited market.
Since some people here don't like long posts, that's all I have for now. But in a day or two I'll have more to say on this.
Only the rushing is heard...
Onward flies the bird.
Garland, it is actually when they start high school.
There is a huge dropout rate at age 14. Kids are starting high school, discovering girls etc.
The question I pose to all you math and stats wizards is this:
How many juniors do we need to nurture to create one active adult CFC member?
At the moment I would say that it is about 20 or more. I get a fair bit of interest from parents and even the occasional adult when I am out and about doing lessons and training with the kids. There are lots of players who are very fond of chess and could easily be persuaded to try out organized chess. It is a social thing though and if new people go to the local chess club and get treated like lepers they never come back. I am afraid that is the problem for adults in Windsor. The university has a thriving chess club at times but when they try to reach out and attend the local chess club they don't get any love and they quickly go away. I have had an adult or two go to our children's chess clubs to take lessons with the kids on occasion. The parents of kids are probably an untapped market. Frank Lee our youth coordinator restarted his chess career because he was driving his kids to out of town tournaments and didn't have anything else to do. The father of one of my students has also started to play in CFC events and also go to the local chess club.
We can definitely get more creative. I think the parents of chessplaying kids are a group that should be pursued with more vigour.
What is the conversion ratio? Are we doing enough to maintain (or grow) our numbers in the long run?
How many juniors do we need to nurture to create one active adult CFC member?
I suspect we have an anomalous situation in Windsor, where the players in the only open chess club (Riverside) are exceptionally unfriendly to newcomers. In some ways, this is understandable, some of those men have been playing together for 40 years, and don't want outsiders. Nothing we can do except wait for them to die.
If we are talking about retaining juniors (or having them return to the CFC after their teenage years), I suspect our retention rate is maybe 1%. Maybe. Of course, we don't "nurture" juniors. At least, I don't. I've been organizing for juniors for about 20 years, and in that time at least 10,000 unique players have attended my events. As far as I know, only three of those 10,000 are CFC members (other than current juniors). In addition, there are maybe two or three parents who have joined the CFC, because their children are involved.
Thanks for the effort in bringing all this together. One thing that struck me was a deeper issue of membership retention that I came across in a book by Richard James from the UK.
The book has the title, "The Right Way to Teach Chess to Kids". I picked up a copy and I'm still re-reading it more carefully, in conjunction with a number of other Beginner and Introductory manuals (including Tom O'Donnell's excellent one still on the CFC site) in an effort to better understand the teaching of chess. In my local club, I have been running both children's classes and an "all ages" club and so I have taught children from scratch and adults from scratch as well. (Children are quicker learners.)
Anyway, Richard James is of the opinion that the method used to teach chess has consequences down the road for retention. He suggests that a poor method of teaching leads to young players reaching their ceiling and dropping out due to lack of progress. It's somewhat compelling of an argument. Young people who do not improve at something, especially something competitive like chess (or something in which the competitive aspect is allowed to dominate), lose interest for perhaps understandable reasons.
James contrasts a method of learning chess, typically in Europe, in which children learn to play from an adult who knows how to teach chess right from the start. He contrasts this approach with the method typically in North America in which players learn the basics (badly) from an adult/parent, after which they go to a chess club to play chess. They learn bad habits and, as a result, are much more likely to reach this ceiling and thereafter quit.
He also strongly suggests prolonging the time for children to learn chess. I have already started to use this with beginners. I strongly discourage them from playing with all of the pieces (a difficult task with children - they want to play like everyone else!) and instead have them play with a few pieces, practicing mock endings, the pawn game, simple mates, Fischer random, etc. etc. Interestingly, when I quoted Richard James's ideas on this point on Jennifer Shahade's blog she gave the idea her thumbs down. But then she is trying to create a winning chess team from a population that is in constant turnover (students in a middle school) and her dream job of a full time chess teacher in school may be dependent on her success OTB with the team.
Anyway, I'm still trying to put together all the elements, I'm not following everything he has written, but, this idea of players reaching their ceiling and thereafter quitting chess, sometimes altogether but certainly competitively, seems very profound. It has an element of universality about it.
May I suggest as a follow-up that we try at the CFC to survey those players who have LEFT competitive chess. Yes, they are rather hard to reach, but the data collected may be a gold mine for us. In such a survey we could ask for details about why they left. Ditto for kids not playing competitively any more. Perhaps the reasons are different that we imagine them to be. Asking the opinion of those who participate in discussion boards, like this one, or those who are still in or around competitive chess, may well miss the point.
Let me just add one more thing about teaching chess. I am of the opinion that teaching chess culture is also important. By this I mean to include teaching children about the etiquette associated with competitive play (shaking opponent's hand before the game, showing respect to one's opponent, etc) as well as the terminology (so many languages are represented in chess), biographical and historical information. And I think the world of the problemist, of chess composition, should also be underlined. Chess is a vast Universe and we do ourselves an enormous disservice if the prejudices of some competitive players drowns out other voices in that Universe for chess newcomers. We should use all the tools at our disposal to "sell" this most beautiful game. Not everyone can reach the heights of chess Mastery and beyond but perhaps identifying the value of other aspects of chess, like composition, heterodox chess, and so on, may help in the retention of players at the competitive level, or help in retaining volunteers to organize it.
Last edited by Nigel Hanrahan; Friday, 16th May, 2014, 01:09 PM.
Reason: adding
Dogs will bark, but the caravan of chess moves on.
I suspect we have an anomalous situation in Windsor, where the players in the only open chess club (Riverside) are exceptionally unfriendly to newcomers. In some ways, this is understandable, some of those men have been playing together for 40 years, and don't want outsiders. Nothing we can do except wait for them to die.
These people you wait for to die, to whom are they unfriendly? Each and every newcomer who wants to play in the club or mostly the younger players?
If the current trend will prevail, by ~2030 there could be no CFC adult members.
There is a lot for junior players these days. When they become adults there isn't much unless they are one of the elite. Many have already accomplished as much in chess as the are likely to do. Unless they want to go into chess politics.
Looking at the stats I would guess there are a lot of events in which adults end up playing mainly young players. Maybe the adults don't like it and only those who don't mind will remain in the game.
An argument can be made for an age, or level of ability, to be reached to play in an adult event or the championships.
I once had a kid who had lost to me in a speed event lift his side of the table and dump the pieces in my lap and on the floor. What adult really needs that?
Anyhow, retaining adults members is not my problem.
By the CFC-FQE agreement, I believe the CFC could/should add the FQE numbers to its statistics... It might help boost the number of players and perhaps find new sponsors.
I did some quick statistics with the FQE public database (Louis might had more accurate data). I'm not sure how are the numbers calculated for the CFC (snapshot, total number in the year, etc.) :
Number of players in 2014 (either members, people who bought a tournament membership or foreign players who participated in a tournament in Quebec) : 1900.
Note that there is no life members (only a few honorary members).
Including :
25 From Haïti
37 Abitibi-Témiscamingue
47 Estrie
39 Laurentides
45 Laval
139 Mauricie
133 Montérégie
473 Montréal
152 Outaouais
142 Québec city
582 Unknown / Foreign / Other provinces
Born after Jan. 1 1994 :
768 and possibly others for which the FQE does not have the birthdate.
182 Women / 1718 Men (9.6% / 90.4%)
Note that quite a lot of players did not play any game. This is probably because they registered to get the magazine or because they have the intention to play in a future tournament (like the Canadian Open or the CYCC in Montreal). The number of "regular" members of the FQE as of today is probably more between 1150 and 1200 (versus perhaps 1000 two or three years ago, but I can't find the numbers).
Last edited by Felix Dumont; Saturday, 17th May, 2014, 08:08 PM.
Digging just a little under the base stats here, there is more orientation required to be communicated.
(A) The junior members rise in 2014 is the result of a political anomaly. In summer 2012 (fiscal 2013) the CYCC event organizer refused to collect junior memberships which cost CFC a count of 80 juniors negated from the stats that should have been in there on May 1st, 2013. The CYCC of summer 2013 (fiscal 2014) did collect the required memberships, thus the generous bounce of juniors in 2014.
(B) The annual memberships report date for is supposed to be May 1st. This year I noticed the stats did not get released until May 15th. An average week will collect about 15-20 new renewals, so I can only assume these stats are padded with the extra renewals collected in the last 2 weeks. Not sure why the rules changed or who authorized this. Our administration always adhered to the required reporting consistency. Had we been allowed extra weeks, we could have provided better numbers than actual as well.
A similar sudden drop of 100 adults also occurred in May 2005 when 118 adults dropped out, again in the first year after I was dismissed. I believe you are all under-estimating the importance of the administration required. No membership is automatic and these memberships do not belong to you without the required services. Instead we hear “spin” that players are un-happy with their rating (in 2005), or now possibly the weather !? (Remember the old Soviet Union… every year there was a “drought” in the Ukraine).
When we took over in 2009 then President Lavin was explained by us about all the shenanigans destroying the CFC and he told us that those things were not going to be happening anymore. That promise made to the members and all stakeholders was again broken last year with a very unorthodox RFP process.
You know it is a great shame Treasurer Fred McKim is not here on ChessTalk anymore because a year ago he told us the worst was over, we’d reached the turning point, he even told us that the new contractor was the greatest thing he had seen in 40 years! Now-a-days we have a more realistic President Drkulec who says if we follow his philosophy and stick together we can solve this in the end. Sorry, no one believes you anymore, and actually in the face of this rapidly deteriorating situation these comments look ridiculous. In the CFC office mass administrative deficits gather by the day, all while the internal democracy of the CFC is undermined by the new NFP template.
Your mis-calc on memberships;
The previous admin contract entailed a provision that if memberships collected dropped below a base level then we would actually have to pay the CFC back for that. This provided incentive to perform. With the new contract this provision was dropped by the people who “knew better”. We have to realize that without incentive the guy doing the admin is just going to sit there, or take a summer trip to India etc…
Again, a shame that once the new administration contract was launched last year, treasurer McKim never came back here on ChessTalk to see us.
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