As is now tradition, we took some time on Saturday evening to talk about demographics of the YDW 2013 population. Here is a summary of that discussion with the accompanying Charts & Graphs.

Where are we all from?

This heatmap shows how many people came to YDW from various states. The imbedded pie chart shows the same data in more detail.

YDW Attendees by Region by Year

Regional data is drawn from the “travel from” addresses supplied during registration. 2013 n = 145, previous years n  155.

• Massachusetts always sends lots of people to YDW, but this year the geographical distribution seems to have shifted west, away from Boston towards the Pioneer Valley and I-91 corridor.

• We seem to be pulling more from NYC and southern states (NC, SC, VA, TN, KY, etc.) than in the past, while registrations from the mid-atlantic

(MD, DC, VA, PA, NJ, etc) have leveled/dropped off.

• In terms of flying, people seem to be more likely to fly to Logan than Manchester even if it’s further away. This makes sense if you consider that the number of people coming from Boston makes it easier to get a ride from the airport.

How many times have you been to YDW?

Based on 2013 attendance data (n = 157), 65 people (41%) are at YDW for the first time this year. 9 people have attended every YDW (only 2 of those are committee members). The pie chart and bar graph both show the same data.

A chi-square goodness of fit test shows that the distribution is not what would be expected from random (?2 = 79.6, d.f. = 5, p < 0.001), meaning the groups are statically significantly different. In particular, there is a high percentage of people here for the first time, which is cool considering interest in making sure newcomers can attend was one of the more unanimous results of last year’s registration survey (see more about the survey here).

 

From 2009-2013, on average 46.5% of YDW attendees were newcomers (2008 is excluded because everyone was new that year).

 

 

Age Distribution

The overall distribution of ages at YDW has been remarkably stable for the past 3 years. However, there is a slight positive trend of increasing mean age per year.

 

 

 

Payment Data

Once again our “pay-what-you-can” system was successful for meeting our financial goals, with our average payment coming in at just over our at cost price. Thanks for making it work, everyone!

 

 

Waitlist

We let more people in off the waitlist and let them in sooner this year than ever before. This is partially a function of having a longer waitlist, but also is likely related to the lottery process. As we get closer to YDW, we start to move through the waitlist more quickly. Some reasons this might happen:

• More people cancel closer to the event because of last minute and/or unforeseen conflicts.
• More people either decline an offered waitlist spot or decide to leave the waitlist because they are not in a position to attend last minute.

Although there were still about 30 people on the waitlist at the time of the event, all of those were folks who had signed up after the lottery was held, meaning we were able to offer a spot to everyone who registered during the initial lottery period.