Hyperinflation of membership numbers: Why add GST to the number of members?

At the end of November last year, overnight the Neighbourly Team (NT) appears to have added 300 ghost members to the number of Titirangi members.

The same was done throughout the county on the same date (circa 25/26 November 2016).

Was something like 15% added to the actual number of members (address-verified; at least with an “L” plate) and rounded up to the nearest 100 for bigger suburbs?

Adding the equivalent to GST to the actual number of members does not seem right to me. What do you think?

The actual number of address-verified members at the end of June 2017 in Titirangi (and perhaps the whole of New Zealand) was still less than the actual number of members claimed at the end of November last year 🙁

Was this done just to make a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) look better?

 

 

This means that when Neighbourly claims to have 500,000 members the actual number of address-verified members (all Neighbourly members are address-verified) is more likely to be less than 435,000.

This means there would be over 65,000  non-existent ghost members invented by Neighbourly when Neighbourly claims membership has reached 500,000 🙁

In stead of 1780 members (address-verified as per the list of members on the website), overnight the number of members jumped to 2080 on the Noticeboard when members next visited the site.

At the end of June this year, there was a similar discrepancy. Supposedly Titirangi had 2330 members but when you looked at the list of members there were only 100 pages of members listed with 20 members listed on each page (except for the last page).

This means the actual number of address-verified members at the end of June (under 2000) was still less than the number of members claimed at the end of November last year (2080) 🙁

It certainly indicates that the actual number of address-verified members in Titirangi at the end of 2017  is likely to be close to Neighbourly’s claimed number of actual members in November 2016 (not a projection).

There are rumours at the time that Neighbourly claimed a backlog for processing members last November and/or trying to include as members people who were just visiting the website.

Clearly since the difference has increased marginally up to the end of June, any backlog should have been cleared by now.

Perhaps Neighbourly ran projections last November for the number of members in 12 month’s time, using say 10%, 15%, and 20% increases, and just decided to round up to the nearest 100,  the 15% increase amount for larger suburbs (claiming this to be the current number of members) with lesser rounding up for smaller suburbs?

Titirangi was one of the top five suburbs by number of members. It is possible that NT could have projected an even a larger percentage of ghosts for the smaller suburbs, anticipating a higher growth rate perhaps.

I have a master’s degree in maths but I am sure you don’t need one to realise that something is not right here 🙁

Was Fairfax Media (at least a 45% shareholder of Neighbourly) aware of this happening?

Was this done just to make a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) look better?

LiesDamnLies

 

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