One of the myriad issues with STARFLEET elections is that all of the attention is usually spent on convincing the existing membership that a particular team is going to do a great job for the benefit of STARFLEET members. Here’s the problem with that.

Potential STARFLEET members do not vote in STARFLEET elections.

But we can learn a lot by looking at how Star Trek fans are choosing to express their fandom. The official Star Trek twitter account has 329,000 followers. 3.6 million people like the Star Trek page on Facebook. These people are out there. They’re not here. Star Trek is a great big property that’s been around for 50 years. It’s got some fans.

As of this writing, there are 4923 members in STARFLEET. That represents about 1.5% of the people on the Star Trek Twitter, and 0.13% of the Star Trek Facebook numbers. Even in the fandom category, STARFLEET is only half-as-large as the largest Star Trek fan club in the world.

One thing is pretty clear about those numbers: STARFLEET is not meeting the needs of Star Trek fans, or those numbers would be higher. Also, STARFLEET’s membership numbers haven’t really oscillated that much out of that range in the past decade or more, which raises the question of STARFLEET meeting the needs of STARFLEET members.

Even with a tremendous amount of marketing cash spent on launching Star Trek movies and TV shows, STARFLEET hasn’t been able to reap the benefits of those efforts. There’s a new series on the way, and the last three movies have made close to a billion dollars (if not more).

But I can already hear the age-old complaint — The Star Trek Facebook Page is free, so is the Star Trek Twitter account! So are other Star Trek fan clubs! We’re different because we charge money. According to Trek author Greg Cox, a decent rule-of-thumb for tie-in novels is that you can expect to sell books to about 1-2% of the viewing audience. A STARFLEET membership costs about as much as a new Star Trek novel, and they’ve sold millions of those books. It’s not about the membership dues.

In other words, something is wrong. If we want STARFLEET to be relevant again, we need to make some real changes.