We've been talking for some time as a Board about the aging membership and the aging hobby in general. There has been some lip service to the notion of a demographic time bomb out there, but our information hasn't been solid enough to create the "oh my God !!" reaction that I suspect is warranted.

I don't recall seeing any projections of membership that I thought were based on careful analysis. Such material may exist, but I'm not aware of it. There may be something buried in some committee reports on ODV, but nothing pops out at me. I asked Director Frenaye about it, and he couldn't come up with any that weren't cursory either, though he did give me some very good information on attempts to deal with this that we have made in the past.

It also seems to me that there is enough data available out there that a good statistician or actuary could tease out a very accurate projection of membership over time, based on life expectancy, current age of members, various membership acquisition rates, various membership retention rates, etc. Back in engineering school years ago (I mean YEARS ago) I chose to take probability in the math department, rather than statistics in the engineering department, so I really don't know how to do it myself.

Tom did some investigation a while back, and it appears that we can get detailed data pertaining to the ages both of members, and of hams in general. It would cost on the order of $10,000. That gets us the data. I'm not sure what the actuarial work would cost.

What could we learn? Things like:

- will the membership begin to fall off? When and how fast?

- how fast do we have to create new hams and new members in order to reverse such a trend

- how sensative are these trends to the ages of new Hams nd Members that we might create

If I had to guess, I would say that the numbers would be far more alarming than most people think. I imagine a curve that looks flat for 3 or maybe 4 years, then drops off precipitously, perhaps at an annual rate of 5% or more. I'm also going to guess that the position of the knee of the curve is more dependent than we suspect on membership acquisition rate. I also predict that the age spread (deviation around the mean) is critical to the calculation, and that our age distribution is rather tight (ie., lots of members between 55 and 75, relatively few below that) making for a fast falloff. But then I'm only guessing.

So, I propose that we spend a few serious dollars to try to figure this out. Here is my proposal, framed as a motion. Any takers on the front Bench?

73,

Mike

K1TWF

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Your-Name-Here

WHEREAS it appears that the population of Hams in general and ARRL members in particular is aging, and WHEREAS the effects of this demographic phenomenon will likely have a profound effect on ARRL membership, in turn having profound effects on the organization

THEREFORE it is moved:

1. that the ARRL acquire detailed data on the age of Hams and of ARRL members; and

2. that we enlist the services of a suitable actuary or actuarial firm to analyze this data and create a model so as to generate for us defensible projections of Ham and League Member counts over the next 20 years, using various assumptions as to rate of creation of new Hams, proportions of new Hams who will become members, ages of new Hams, etc.

COST: roughly $10,000 for the data and roughly $5,000 for the analysis

Mike Raisbeck
k1twf@arrl.net