X-Message-Number: 30326 From: David Stodolsky <> Subject: Re: Alcor Membership Statistics, etc. Date: Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:36:22 +0100 References: <> On 11 Jan 2008, at 07:39, Mike Perry wrote: > > > Here are some (public) data on recent Alcor membership, patient > count etc. > > ..A....B...C...D..E..F > 2000 516 41 28 5 27 > > 2007 838 78 23 3 25 > > Key: > A: Year > B: Number of Members (non-patients), end of year > > F: Total cancellations of memberships during the year Membership growth over the 2000-2007 period can be modeled as linear, with an increase of 49 a year. This is a highly significant result (RSquare = .99, p<.0001). Cancellations as a percent of membership goes down, but this is only a trend (p < .1) The data appears to be stable after 2002 at about 3.5% (cancels/member). The previous two years are about double that. So, nothing can really be concluded about cancellation percentages. Alcor is loosing a member for each two gained for the first and last 2 years of the period. The ratio for the whole period is about .4 cancels per signup each year. However, years 2002-2004 are about half the rate compared to 2000-2002 and 2006-2007. A quadratic fit for the period is significant, but a linear fit is not. For some reason, the number of new patients per year at Alcor is slightly decreasing from the first to the last year, but the only trend that approached significance was a quadratic fit, peaking in 2003. CI's patient growth has always been increasing. I received another data set of Alcor membership from 1972 to 2007. This data can be linearly modeled, yielding a long-term growth rate of about 25 members per year (RSquare = .91, p<.0001). The log transformed data can also be fit linearly at a highly significant level. This yields and even better fit (RSquare = .98, p<.0001). However, observation suggests that there are 3 different growth periods. There was no change until 1976, when membership more than doubled. From then until 1993, there was a 8.8% increase each year in the growth rate (RSquare = .98, p<.0001). From 1994 until 2007 it was a 3.1% increase each year in the growth rate (RSquare = .99, p<. 0001). A linear fit of these last results was slightly better than an overall fit. There was a drop in the number of members from 1980 to 1981 and from 1993 to 1994. If we compare these results with the Cryonics Institute (CI) data analyzed earlier, we can see a big difference in growth-rate increases. The CI data showed an increase in growth rate of 23% per year from 1998 to 2004. Earlier, there was a 19% increase in growth rate each year. So, it is clear that CI's growth-rate increase has always been greater, however, this difference has become larger since 1994. Yearly growth increase now appears to be about 20% per year greater for CI. Beyond the other differences, the stability of CI appears to be much greater in terms of membership growth and growth-rate increases. Alcor growth-rate increases seemed to proceed in 3 spurts, followed by slight drops in increase rates. The hypothesis that a self-replacing Board is more stable, doesn't appear to be supported by these data. If we are going to say anything of marketing interest, additional information is needed. For example, numbers of information packages sent out each year, any price changes, also some demographics would be useful. I presume that organizations inquire about how the person became aware of cryonics and the organization. These types of data would also be useful. If all organizations would send out a single page survey with inquiries/signups/cancels, this could go a long way toward understanding some of the above figures and giving useful marketing insights. I'd like to thank Mike Perry and the Alcor insider, that prefers to remain anonymous, for the data sets. dss David Stodolsky Skype: davidstodolsky Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=30326