Measuring Integration II: Drewpocalypse
Given rise and fall of the Drew-Boom I felt it would be interesting to track how we are doing on the integration side of things. I'll be comparing this to the
baseline I established approximately a year ago. So while our nation count is doing pretty well and facing a slow decline, it'll be interesting to see how our citizenship retention and involvement are doing. For this study I collected all of the citizen applicants during the first two days of the Drew-boom (4/20 and 4/21). This totals to 52 Citizens, which represents approximately half of the citizens we gained during the boom and a slightly larger sample size than the baseline.
As you can see above the retention rate after 30+ days is significantly lower than than the baseline. The first study had about a 1/4th retention rate, which is approximately on par with what we have been doing in term of our nation count the last few months. This evidently is much much worse as it represents only about 1/10th retention on the forums.
The first place to point the blame for these poor numbers might be lackluster integration efforts by the Ministry of Interior, however the above graph suggest that there is not much we could have done on the retention front. 40 of the 52 new citizens (76%) did not have any engagement on the forums beyond five days. Additionally, 30 of the new citizens never posted again after the day they applied to the forums. There really isn't much we can do if they don't ever come back after that intial interation. These numbers of basically instant losses are significantly higher than the previous ieteration of this study. It's a jump from about 38% instant losses last July to 57% today. This partialy explains the lower retention rate overall as less new citizens were possible integratees.
In aggregate the percent that showed some actual participation in the region is about the same, 34.7% a year ago and 30.4% today. The more concerning part is the lower share of people actually joining a ministry in their time here in the region. The percent entering the bottom footrung of government in Europeia droped from 24.5% to 17.4%. I think this drop is signifcant and could show the ever increasing trend of people prefering the social and casual aspects of the region over getting involved and contributing to the government in some way. It's definetly possible that something like the discord buddy program, which to date we still don't have any actual data on, could increase the effectiveness of dragging people into the actual politics of the region.
In summary, while gameside we've seen a sustained uptick in activity and likely a long term boost in nation count, that has not translated to the forums based on this sample. Of the new citizens included in this study only Winnark and Selestial have made any significant contributions to the region in any forum and are the only ones to even have the likelyhood of still being citizens over the next 30 days. That really winnows down the retention rate a lot more, and rasies the question what more, if anything, could we have done to get this massive uptick in citizen applicants to stay? What are your thoughts?
