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Our Membership

2020 Membership Report:

An Update from the Validation

Board Chair Tony Aston FSyI

If 2019 was seen as the year of Brexit then, very definitely, 2020 was
the year of Covid-19. The coronavirus pandemic severely, and in some
cases permanently, affected and changed all aspects of everyday life,
culturally, socially and for businesses, and continues to do so. The
Security Institute was not immune to this, having to change, in many
aspects, its methods of operation to address each challenge presented
by the pandemic and associated government-led restrictions.

The Validation Board (VB) was no exception. Once the initial lockdown
was put in place on 23rd March 2020, it was clear that significant
changes would need to be made in order for business-as-usual to
continue. At a time when membership applications were continuing to
significantly increase month on month, it was decided that, for the
foreseeable future, VB meetings would be held virtually, something
which had not, up until that point, been done on a regular basis. In
order to address this ever-increasing volume of applications, it was also
apparent that meetings would have to be held twice each month. The
risk of not doing this would have meant that the Membership Registrar
was likely to become overwhelmed by the sheer volume of work
required to get all applications ready to be tabled for a single monthly
VB meeting with a resulting probability of unwelcome and unacceptable
delays.

I must say that members of the VB across the United Kingdom and
overseas stepped up to the plate magnificently. It became a regular
feature that between 15 and 20 members attended every virtual
meeting from a VB pool of circa 40.
And what a year it has been for membership recruitment since then.
Each month saw between 60 and 100 applications reviewed and
validated by the VB. The result was that an incredible 1,171 new
members were recruited across all membership levels. 2020 became
the first year since the Security Institute was founded that over 1000
new members had been recruited in a single 12 month period.

That said, overall nett increase in membership increased by just 322. On
the face of it, and given the large annual increase in recruitment (1171),
an increase of 322 in total membership appears to be a small figure.
However, this must be seen in the context of a major one-off project
conducted during the year by Head Office staff. This project, carried out
over several months, reconciled the actual number of student members
who were still part of recognised studying programmes as opposed
to those who had not notified the Institute that they had ceased studies
and who had not converted to professional membership. This had the
effect of increasing the number of leavers from the Institute
membership for 2020 by 617. Now complete, all remaining student
members have been verified and new student management processes
put in place.

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