Fall 2006 - Tremendous Growth for IGDA Finland

With Average Attendance of 146, Final Figures for Fall of 2006 Show Tremendous Growth for IGDA Finland It has been a great fall and our 2006-2007 season is off to a great start. In the last 5 months, we have organized 5 gatherings, the last two of them with sponsoring. In December we had our most labour intensive program to organize in IGDA Finland history, in cooperation with AMD, AMO / Nintendo Suomi and Samsung. Looking at the numbers, I can only be happy with the results of our group of volunteers.

When compared to last year figures during the same period, we have achieved some considerable growth in attendance. In the Fall 2005, our average attendance was 98.75 attendees/gathering. This fall it has been 146.4 attendees/gathering. That's a growth of almost 50%! Even if we exclude the attendance numbers from sponsored gatherings, we have still achieved 45% growth in average attendance.

We have also managed to grow the number of actual IGDA memberships. In July 2006, IGDA Finland had 162 members. By the end of the year, we now have 180 members! That's huge! That means Finland is #5 country in IGDA memberships, behind such game industry heavy weights such as US, Canada, UK and Japan.

This fall also saw the re-launch of igda.fi, with all it's improvements. The website is not only better looking, but we have managed to update it more regularly and provide more interesting content for it. Since the release of the new website we have seen a rapid growth month to month: from 213 unique visitors per month in August to whopping 1022 in December. Truly remarkable progress, which really validates that the website re-launch has been a huge success!

And last but not least, we have grown the size of the invitation mailing list as well. In July 2006, we had 541 people on the list, now we have 587.

Here are all of these afore-mentioned stats in pure numbers:

Average Attendance - Fall 2005: 98.75 - Fall 2006: 146.40 - growth: 48.25% Average Attendance w/o sponsored gatherings - Fall 2005: 72.00 - Fall 2006: 104.33 - growth: 44.90% Memberships - Summer 2006: 162 - End of year 2006: 180 - growth: 11.11% Size of invitation mailing list: - Summer 2006: 541 - End of year 2006: 587 - growth: 8.5%

- Jyri Ranki, Lead Coordinator