Activity levels in a games society

I swept up the past six months of activity for our local games soc (January-June 2023) to try and give us a sense of how many of us there are at present.

Thanks to one of our members dilligent (and consistently formatted) table arranging on our forum ahaead of events I could go back over our Adventurers League equivalent games so far and see who had registered to attend. We had three venues in play so far this year: Friday nights at our old primary, our new primary after the old could no longer host us and Saturday brunch-slot at another place. Over all we had 28 events in the period, including a lull after we lost our old venue and were figuring out a new one.

Attendance has been a bit diluted by the shift - we got ~20 folk on average at the old primary but now ~15 at the new primary, ~10 at the brunch sessions. In total this is an extra table of gaming per weekend which is nice, balanced by the fact its a venue split so not all together. Some folk are playing both weekend slots also.

If we count people in seats throwing dice there were ~ 420 of them at all the VALUE events so far. Just over half (216/420) of those times the dice-throwers were the same 16 people. So about half of our activity is coming from 1/6 of the people.

Basically it looks like we have a core of ~16 folk who turn up a lot and a big fuzzy cloud of others who sometimes make it. We typically get 2-3 tables at any of our events with a rotating cast of DM's doing mini campaigns or one-shots for whomever signs up for a given week.

Other bits from what I see:
It looks like we have had 102 people show up at least once this year across 28 events.
6 people have been at more than half the events this year
If someone joined more than 2 events they were in the top half of our active members
26 folk joined more than twice but aren’t part of the “16 most active” group. We saw them 5 times on average.
43 people only turned up once so far this year

Caveat: this is a slight undercount as there is another group of a half dozen that organises themselves playing Old School D&D, known as the Gazebo. We also are missing guests brought along and walk ins who did not get logged on the forum - about 6 unnamed guests were mentioned in the half year examined and let us say the same again in walk-ins. Those may make a difference but I think the general patterns we see here would hold.

To try and bump these up, we're going to try and improve our scheduling from 'in the week' relatively ad-hoc arrangements of who will be DM'ing on a day to longer lead so people can set up around it. Our other thing we are going to try is helping more people start DM'ing so we have a deeper bench to support more tables. We think we could get more people to come if we get the word out more widely but no point in doing that if we've got no space in games when they turn up.

Let us see how all this goes and come back to it at the end of the year.