When someone asks how many members the C’s has, I often waffle a little bit, not because I don’t know the answer, but because of the semantics of “membership.”

If you’ll look at your membership card or your convention registration information, you’ll notice that you pay annual membership dues to the NCTE, not CCCC. That’s because the CCCC is a conference of NCTE, not a separate organization with its own tax ID and own membership rolls.

But there are at least three methodologies we can use to answer the question.

First, when you join NCTE, you check a little box about which voting section you want to belong to (elementary, middle, secondary, or college). Currently 6,612 members have “College” marked as their voting section.

Second, we can count NCTE members who want to take CCC as their journal—that number currently stands at 5152, and is the figure we typically give when pressed on the question of number of C’s members.

Third, we can count those who register for the spring convention. At our 2015 convention in Tampa, 3,376 registered and 60 more attended as part of local committee or exhibitors = 3436 in all.

What story do these numbers tell?  The difference in the college section numbers and the CCC numbers probably come from the fact that NCTE registers a lot of members from English Education, and while many of them belong to the College Section, they don’t necessarily attend the C’s.

And although you can’t see it, the number of registrations at any given C’s is not the same people every year. One segment of those members (perhaps 40%) will attend every convention.  Another segment (30-40%) are long-time members who will attend the convention only when it’s geographically close. And the final segment (perhaps 20-25%) are new members who take advantage of the fact that a big national convention is coming to their geographic area.

The reason we have to guess is that we don’t ask you about your attendance patterns (although we do know who’s attending for the first-time). We have to use database analytics to try to develop these attendance patterns to be completely accurate, but these percentages are good enough for now to illustrate the makeup of a convention.

I’ll blog about this later, but these registration patterns confirm that a) location matters and b) our efforts (Newcomers Committee, C’s the Day game, and general collegiality by all of us) to make first-timers feel welcome have a material and meaningful impact on membership. Why?  Location matters because a substantial block of members skip the convention every two or three years because it’s on the other side of the country. Welcoming efforts matter because some of the first-timers get hooked and will attend subsequent conventions—we think that number may be 10-20% of first-timers.

Note: There are many other numeric ways to look at convention activity. For fun and edification, please check out chenchen328’s analysis of the Twitter stream that used our official hashtag #4C15, and which generated 19,840 tweets during March 2015:  http://www.tweetarchivist.com/chenchen328/1.  I don’t think anyone has done this, but we ought to correlate Twitter activity to both membership and conference registration. If there’s substantial interest out there in the world from people who don’t/can’t attend the convention, or who don’t belong to NCTE, could there be room for an alternate type of membership/participation?