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Personnel Department - Trend Charts

Posted Oct. 5, 2020, 9:28 p.m. by Vice Admiral Daniel Lerner (Procedures Guru / Personnel Director / Chief EGO) (Daniel Lerner)

So I’ve been told that while it is important that we record and report the stats, etc. in the PDept reports, it is hard for the average user not dealing with these numbers every day for over two year (have I been PDir that long?!) to appreciate what the numbers mean or the trends. I’ve decided to experiment with some charts to help visualize the trends.

I’ll start with the membership tracking charts. If people think these are useful, I’ll also add trends for which departments have the most requests/placements, and how we are doing with our processing times for placements.

Recruitment and Retention Chart

A big issue tracked by the PDept is how our membership numbers changing from month-to-month and why. I’ve decided to make a chart to help visualize that. Keep in the mind the following:

  • The yellow bar represent the net change in membership from month to month. A stable membership means it is zero, and a growing club means it is positive. However, a negative value means the club's membership is decreasing. The other bars tell you why.
  • The green bar is good, and represents new members who posted at least once in the past month. That results in a positive net change, and a positive yellow bar.
    • The blue bar is also good, but is a much smaller impact. These are returning members who posted at least once in the past month. Every returning member who posts is in increase to our active membership. NOTE: this blue bar is not 100% accurate - we can only track returning members who first join Exodus; a person on Exodus and leaves, but then comes back a few months later, the PDept won't know about.
  • The red bar is bad, but inevitable. It measures the members who left STF in the past month. There should always be some members leaving: we have a low retention rate among new members (see the later charts), and if a member posts once when they join and then leaves, the will be counted as a departing member the following month. NOTE: The number is calculated from the other numbers, and since the blue bar is not 100% accurate, neither is the red bar; that is why you might see a zero or a positive number for the red bar.

Here is the chart: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1COfnHLY5VT1R5cy9a3-skFCV-GZoFCw41Efgd0rd91s/edit?usp=sharing. The different spreadsheets give you a 2-year snapshot, a 1-year snapshot, a 6-month snapshot and a 3-month snapshot.

Member Tracking Chart

So what is the trend of the number of new members placed per month, and how many of them actually stay active? Those numbers are in the report, but hard to see the trend if you aren’t following this all the time.

It’s a bit too difficult to have Google Sheets do a clustered stacked column graph with three stacked columns per month. So I instead give the overview of the new members’ activity within the 0-1 month range and then the 2-3 month range (skipping the 1-2 month range). Each month represents the new placements for that month that the PDept then tracked. The first bar is how active they were at the first report after they were placed (i.e. 0-1 months), and then again at the third report after they were placed (i.e. 2-3 months).

The chart only goes to the July 2020 placements, as that is the last one we would have two to three months of data on.

There are three charts (each one can be seen with the actual values or the percentages):

If these charts are useful, I will include them in future reports to make it easier for those trying to follow the numbers.

Daniel Lerner
Personnel Director

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