Odometer Effect

One of the first things I do every day is check Fractured Atlas’s “membership analytics dashboard” so that I can monitor how many new members have signed up in the last day, week, month, along with the pace of membership terminations, depth of service utilization, etc. (Yes, I know I’m a geek.)

The closest thing to a “bottom line” in this kind of analysis is the answer to the question: how many Fractured Atlas members are there? It’s something we get asked all the time, and it’s the best 1-number snapshot of whether artists and arts organizations find our services worthwhile.

All of this is to say that I was pretty psyched to see the odometer flip over to 10,000 members, which happened yesterday around 5:45pm. For us, 10,000 is a pretty big number. It’s deeply gratifying (and a little scary!) that so many of you have chosen to trust us with everything from your health insurance to your organization’s financial support.

Out of curiosity, I decided to peek into the data archives to look at some of the past landmark membership thresholds. Here’s what I found:

100 members: March 15, 2002

500 members: December 12, 2002

1,000 members: July 23, 2003

2,500 members: August 30, 2006

5,000 members: March 29, 2008

10,000 members: November 10, 2009

Is there deeper meaning in all of this? Not really, except to note that membership growth seems to have really accelerated in the past couple of years. Hopefully that’s because you’re all telling your friends and colleagues about us. Please continue to do so!

Anyway, please forgive my unseemly boasting. Perhaps you can forgive me on the grounds that I won’t have another opportunity for a while. After all, 100,000 is a long way off. I’m thinking February 2010 at the absolute earliest.