The Society for Creative Anachronism is where I learned to do my pre-17th century skills in calligraphy, parchment, ink and pigment making. It is a worldwide not-for-profit educational organization dedicated to learning the pre-17th century world by doing the things they did. For more information please feel free to visit www.sca.org.
Over there years there have been many debates regarding the SCA gaining or losing membership. And of course there is the question of how many participants exist that aren’t paying membership fees. In the end we know we have the numbers for paid membership correct. And of course since we emulate and learn about the pre-17th century world, we don’t call our areas “regions”. No, that would be dull and dreary right? Instead we call them “Kingdoms”! Much more fun that.
Our membership numbers are fairly stable considering we are a worldwide organization.
Total Membership numbers by year.
And if we split that out by “Kingdom” we see a more crowded chart but also a better picture of when and where is doing better.
You can visit this chart at: https://imgur.com/a/oXeH24Q
Another way to look at this information of membership number by year is to use a bar chart. I think it more clearly shows the trends.
Each “Kingdom” is clustered with each bar being memberhip number by year.
As you can see the numbers are fairly steady by “Kingdom” as well. Something of interest, One of the drops in membership numbers in one “Kingdom” is that another “Kingdom” split off from them. Thus taking their membership numbers with them.
As you can see from the two charts the SCA has a healthy membership base. We are the largest re-creation organization in the world as far as I know. And our membership numbers are fairly stable though we’re always looking to make new friends.
scribescribbling 
The numbers on the SCA.org web site are all awkwardly stored in a series of PDF files — did you re-key these into a spreadsheet format? If so, would you be willing to share that work with others? Thank you!
I linked to the person who did the numbers and their numbers on the article.
Well, I guess I’m having trouble finding that link, because all I can see is the link to the main SCA web site and to Imgur. Is there another link in here somewhere that leads to the raw numbers?
I’m guessing this only includes Drachenwald members who buy SCA international membership and not those in affiliation groups, i.e. everyone in Finland, Sweden (our largest population group), Iceland, UK, Ireland and Denmark.
Do you know whether membership includes affiliates? I’m guessing from the Lochac figures it doesn’t, but then the Drachenwald figures suggest it might include at least the two largest Drachenwald affiliates.
These are the merely visualizations of the raw data you can get from http://www.sca.org webiste. As far as *I* know they are for SCA Inc only.
Do you have links to the graphs? Some of these are hard to read in this format. Especially the bar graph by kingdom.
What a fascinating graph! Thank you for sharing this. Do you have any insight about the large jump between 2002 and 2005? Are you aware of a policy shift, cultural event, or recruiting effort that may have contributed to the marked increase in membership during those years?
The only thing that really happened around then is in 2001 the Lord of the Rings movie came out. There weren’t really any major policy shifts in the SCA at that time that I am aware of. Which is to say there might be, but I don’t know of them if they were.
When the the NMS becomes a thing?
My guess is the widespread use of communicating via the internet. I know that I benefitted around that time with staying in communication with other SCA people I knew in other kingdoms starting in 1999-2000 via Yahoo groups and other things like Tribe.net. Probably most Kingdoms had websites by then so anyone searching on the web might come across us, rather than randomly coming across a fighter practice in a park or having a local group at your college.
There are a lot of possibilities and mixed thereof as well. As a social scientist it would be irresponsible to suggest a definitive “something” without testing first.
I hypothesize it was a variety of factors coming together. I don’t have a way to test that though.