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What is the "Average" BNI Member?
By Dr. Ivan Misner, Founder & CEO
Last year BNI cooperated with Steve Brewer, a graduate student from St. Thomas University in the United States, as part of his Masters Thesis in Marketing. As a result of this research, we have acquired an interesting picture of the average BNI member.
Based on this study, we learned that over 76% of all members came to BNI because they were invited by someone!
OK, that's not a big surprise since we are a "word of mouth" organization; however, it is excellent reinforcement to what we already know - namely, that people mostly join BNI through the "invitation process". Amazingly, only 24% came to the organization from all other forms of marketing and advertising combined (including the internet, tradeshows, calendar listings, newspaper articles, etc). Traditional media exposure definitely supports recognition of the BNI "brand", but what brings most members in is one person asking another person to visit.
The overwhelming majority, 70%, first visited BNI because they were interested in some type of networking group. Roughly 6% were encouraged by their company to attend. But what's most interesting is that 5% of the people who visited and joined, didn't want to offend the person who invited them!
One of the questions asked in the study related to how comfortable people felt when they first visited. An astounding 93% of all people who joined felt welcomed by other members when they first visited. This is an incredibly high number that members should be very proud of. I can assure you that not all networking organizations would get a score this high.
An impressive 79% of all BNI members reported that the business they generated from the organization had either met, or exceeded, their expectations.
There was a fairly even distribution in the length of membership discovered in the survey. Thirty-nine percent (39%) of all members had been in BNI for less than one year. Roughly 28% were members for 1-2 years and the remaining 33% had been members for over 2 years. (Note - the Region that this survey was conducted in was roughly 4 years old at the time of the survey.)
According to the study, 74% of all members identified themselves as business owners and 23% said they were employees.
Over half of our members, 58%, were between the ages of 30 - 49. With approximately 32% being over 50 and only 10% being 29 years old or younger. When I first saw this last statistic, I wished I had received it a few months earlier. I was visiting a Region at the time that had a prospective member that went to ONE chapter and tried to tell me that the organization was made up of youngsters (which according to him were people under 30!).
I tried to explain that one chapter may vary from another, but that from my experience, most groups had a fairly even age distribution. As it turns out, the results from this study clearly conclude that roughly 90% are over 30 years old. The actual graph is a classic bell curve with the under 30 and over 60 ranges being the low ends of both sides of the curve.
Finally the last statistic from the study that I'd like to share in this article is one that has remained fairly constant over the last decade. The study found that roughly 41% of BNI members in the survey were female and 59% were male. This roughly 60/40 split, was virtually identical to previous studies done in the past. Although some specific countries may vary substantially on this one area, we have found most Regions to have this general distribution of BNI members.
So, what have we learned from this study?
Well, we've learned that the overwhelming majority of members joined because someone invited them. We found that although most people were interested in networking groups - almost all of them found the BNI group they visited to be very friendly. We discovered that a very high percentage of members generate as much, or more business from BNI than they expected and that over 60% of the members have been involved for more than one year. We learned that close to ¾ of our members are business owners between the ages of 30-50 and that approximately 40% are women and roughly 60% are men.
I believe this is valuable information for BNI groups to have and I hope that you take the opportunity to discuss this within your chapter in the near future.
BNI would like to thank Steve Brewer for his efforts in this study. We were glad to be of assistance in the project. Please note, we are actively seeking research opportunities to evaluate various aspects of our program. If you know someone who is working on a graduate level thesis and is interested in studying a business networking group - a good referral for BNI would be connecting them with us.
Please have them send an email to bni@bni.com including some information on their background, school, and major.
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