IS: Attendance data from a free course
Upcoming events:
- Friday Sept 12: IS Connection Call
- Sunday Sept 14: Community Hub Call 19.11 for members
- Tuesday Sept 16: The Oasis (with Intentional Ventures tent)
Last week's newsletter was "The tease" and the Community Hub session was titled "Aspirations and Schemes".
Data geek post: The Developmental Practice Series is complete, and the attendance was almost exactly what I would have predicted based on past experience. But this time I have good data! (spit out by zoom, with a little cleaning into a spreadsheet) So, so this is me sharing some visual and analytical insight which might benefit anyone else out there thinking about how to plan for a free course they're offering. For context, this course:
- was positioned as a professional-quality course offered for free
- offered low-friction signup with the only requirement a checkbox that participants "intend to make at least 6 out of the 9 weeks"
- ran nine weeks Thursday mornings 9am Pacific / Noon Eastern during the (northern hemisphere) summer
Followthrough
First, how much do people follow through on an unrestricted free signup? Here I've labeled folks into four categories:
25% never showed up once, and another 20% either dropped or were cut from the roster after attending 1 or 2 times total. That leaves just north of 50% as the people who "stick with it".
Weekly Attendance
Here's more attendance granularity on a per-week basis:
Almost 40 people on the first week, after a few early weeks of exponential (logarithmic?) decay, the second half settled in right around 20 attenders on any particular Thursday.
Consistency Distribution
Of the frequent attenders, what was the distribution of consistency across the course?
Those 20-ish weeks were made up of about 30 people total. 5 folks got gold stars for perfect attendance - 9 out of 9 - with another handful missing only once. No big clumps or spikes.
Conclusions
- I figure only 25% no-shows is pretty low — I've heard that "free webinar" type stuff is happy to get 50%. You can definitely "overbook" your course by at least 20% even if you have a hard capacity cap.
- You might come out the other side with about half of those who started. I give us pretty high marks for compelling content and stickiness, but then again it is "tough" stuff that can be triggering, so I can't really say much about the balance of content-enjoyment-based attrition vs "life happens" schedule disruptions.
- I took a look at the subsample of "people who attended 2 out of the first 4 weeks": out of 9, 6 then stopped/dropped BUT 3 became "comeback kids" and finished strong so, that early sign is only about 2/3 predictive.
- Only 3 people attended just the 1st week (and then no more) and I happened to be in contact with all 3 to learn that it was "life happens" for them. So we didn't seem to have any "tourists just show up once" effect.
- But 3 is much smaller than the week-1-to-2 dropoff of 8 total, so people do make extra effort for the first week, and "consistency is hard" kicks in after that.
- Subjectively, this course really hit its stride in week 4 - and it's hard for me to tell if "less early dropoff" would have helped to gel the cohort faster.
I advertised a cap of 50 (and cut off signups at 60, there were a few early drops not counted above) with a target of 20-something. I'd prefer to reduce that first-half drop-off curve further, so the data goes along with conventional wisdom that "more friction" aka a nominal payment barrier may be required to do that.
People were very enthusiastic and giving great testimonials at the end of the course - though of course there has to be some amount of selection bias in that the people who were really going strong would be those getting the most out of it. Still, it feels absolutely great to build up that depth of connection over time, and to have so much energy at the end.
I'll probably write more about how and why the course worked well relationally, but there's the numerical transparency!
Cheers,
James