Member Retention and Success Rates at KillTheCan.org

The idea of “active” members is difficult to talk about because we don’t “force” members to use our resources in any one way.  We absolutely hope that all of our members login to the forums on a daily basis and post their daily promise not to use nicotine that day.  This single simple activity is 100% free, adds accountability and is proven to work.  Sadly, not everyone that joins us posts every day (or ever for that matter).

Forum moderator wastepanel posted this recently and I wanted to share it because, quite frankly… it’s brilliant.

Retention & Success Rates at KillTheCan.org

This is where the battle becomes complicated:

I too have kept track of quitters for a while. It started back with a discussion in February 2012 HOF group along the same regards. I started a spreadsheet, and I update it periodically with numbers. For the period May 2011-Current, we’ve had approximately 4700 people post a day 1 here. That’s around 110 a month (give or take and easily figured out by looking at the spreadsheets for each month). During that time, Chewie has posted a blog post every time we have passed 1000 members. We had 8000 members on 4/20/11 (announcement). We reached 21k September 2014. That is an increase of 13k members in a similar time period that I’ve tracked.

For every new quitter that posts a day 1, there are 2-3 that don’t have that courage. They find a reason not to quit. It’s sad, but it’s a fact of life. Some come back later to post. Others use us as a “library”. When I was at the smokeless summit this past summer, it was amazing to me to hear that all the quit programs from all over the country recommend our library of knowledge on quitting. They have their own programs, however, and use us a tool in theirs.

Here’s the most important stat: During that time, approximately 1700 of us made the HOF (averages 40 per HOF class, and means that for every 2-3 people that don’t make it…1 does.) and doesn’t include any of the Pre-HOF groups (Nov2014-Feb2015). That’s fucking awesome, and best in the business. Baseline for bragging rights is XX% at 6 months quit. Cold turkey (all alone) is 5%. Nicorette/lozenges “double that” according to marketing (but actually have been found to not be as effective or recommended by the products themselves). Medicines, counseling, and group therapy are topping out at 25-30%. 6 months quit would be our August 2014 group. Of the original 99 members, 27 are signed up for 200 (27%). In fact, most of the groups are in that ballpark around 6 months. So, for every HOF member still posting at 6 months, 2-3 fade.

Do we have 11k members posting every day? No. But it wouldn’t surprise me to see about 5000 posters per month put up a day number. It also wouldn’t surprise me that the other 6000 use the blog, chat, mainpage, herbal reviews, etc. either. Remember…quitting isn’t easy. There’s a lot of people here looking for a “magical formula” to quit. It doesn’t happen. It’s what you put into it.

Am I proud of our 21k member list? Yup. We’re (what they call) a niche program. Quit smoking programs are everywhere, but there JUST AREN’T any quit chewing tobacco programs. 6771, 306, 150. That’s the total number of MEMBERS at any comparable site. So, yeah…excuse me for being proud. And, of all those programs, there are probably 200 active quitters COMBINED (and many use this place as their primary base of operations). We all know that why we work here is the activity. New guys need new guys and vets. Vets need new guys and other vets. We have all that here. We’re not ball coddlers. We’re not a ghost town when you need help. We’re not a surly bunch of vets that think we have all the answers. We’re here to quit, and quitting is what we do.

So there you have it… We can’t make people quit. But we’ll continue to keep the lights on, reach out to as many people as we can and make the resource available when they’re ready for as long as they’re ready.  And that’s the bottom line.

When you’re ready to quit dipping… we’ll be here.