Summary
Across the societies we work with, in-person congress attendance recovered to slightly above pre-2020 levels, while virtual participation settled at roughly a quarter of total registrations — well below its peak, but stable for the third consecutive year.
Membership
- Overall membership grew modestly, driven almost entirely by early-career categories.
- Renewal rates were strongest where a member-only resource had been used at least once in the preceding year.
- Lapsed-member reactivation remains the weakest part of the cycle for most societies.
Events
- Median lead time between registration opening and first registration shortened again.
- Late registration continues to concentrate in the final fortnight, with implications for catering and badge production.
- On-demand content is watched mostly in the six weeks after the meeting, then falls away sharply.
The pattern across almost every dataset this year is concentration: the same total, arriving later and in a narrower window.
What we expect next year
Continued growth in early-career membership, further compression of registration timelines, and increasing pressure to justify the virtual track on something other than headline attendance figures.
