BSA membership numbers

[Trevorum 24]

 

This thread is spun from another which was prematurely closed by a moderator.

 

I have recieved several PMs from members asking me where I got the BSA membership numbers I quoted in that thread. Those numbers came from official BSA annual reports from 1991-2003 inclusive. I also found a BSA history with total year end membership numbers from 1911-1993. The data are not sourced, but appear to come from some official BSA publication(s) no longer available.

 

Unlike our resident professional sleuth, David Scott (Miki101), I am not a historian; I can not vouch for the veracity of either data set. Moreover, there is some discrepancy between the two data sets for the few years they overlap which I can not explain. Nonetheless, I would be happy to share the data with anyone who is interested. Send me a PM with your email address and I will reply off-forum with the raw data in an excel file.

 

-Trevorum

[epalmer84 10]

This may have been brought up before. There are two bumps in the numbers for the last few years:

 

1998: Exploring was split with Venturing on the BSA side and Exploring proper moving to Learning for Life. This resulted in a drop on the BSA numbers.

 

2004-6: With the issues of membership fraud, a new system was put into place to verify members. This has resulted in an apparent drop as inaccuracies have been resolved.

 

Ed