In 2024 membership in Toastmasters International finally began to grow again, after having dropped for three years in a row

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been reading the October 2024 centennial issue of Toastmaster magazine, which has an article by Paul Sterman on pages 10 to 15 titled A Century of Toastmasters International. Reaching a centennial is very impressive for an organization. On page 26 there is another article titled Toastmasters Today that begins by stating:

 

“The numbers in this statistical analysis show an uptick in Toastmasters growth and a pattern of continuing diversity.”

 

The infographic says there are 272,000+ members – a growth of 2.2%. But it doesn’t say how many clubs there are. So, I went to the Statistics and Data Hub and looked up the Fact Sheet for July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024 which informed me that there were >13,800 clubs for a growth rate of -3.0%. What happened when the pandemic hit? Regular members don’t get told, but officers can find out. I looked up the CEO Reports for 2022 and 2024 and found the following data:

 

Year    Members   # of Clubs 

2018   357,718       16,672

2019   358,078       16,856

2020   364,212       16,204

2021   300,206       15,875

2022   282,055       14,749

2023   266,564       14,271

2024   272,338       13,846

   

From 2020 to 2021 membership dropped by 64,006 or 17.6%! And from 2019 to 2020 the number of clubs dropped by 652, or 3.9%. I found a chart showing Toastmaster International Membership Growth (1990 to 2020) so I added the data tabulated above, and used Excel to produce the chart for this century, from 2000 to 2024 shown at the top of this post. Membership now is almost at the same level as back in 2011.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I could not find a similar chart for the number of clubs, and looked up data from various web pages at the Toastmasters web site like one for 2011 and another for 2014. The chart shown above summarizes the situation from 2007 to 2024. In 2023 we had fallen back to barely above where we were a decade earlier in 2013. Note that multiplying the number of clubs (13,846 for 2024) by 20 members/club gives 276,920, which is pretty close to the membership of 272,338.        

  

Our organization was significantly wounded by the pandemic. Knowing that, we can work on recovering.