I’ve pontificated before on how to revitalize your ham club. Using these techniques, we’ve increased the membership in the ARROW Communications Assn. by more than 350% in the past couple of years. Now, that’s pretty good, but we wanted to do better.
Sam Proud KC8QCZ came up with the idea of querying the FCC database for hams located in our area. One way to do this is via the ARRL website. On their FCC License Data Search page, you can input a city or zip code, and the page will spit out a list of amateur radio operators in that location. Each listing contains a lot of information, including the ham’s name and address, the type of license they hold, and when that license was issued. (Before you get all excited, remember that this information IS public information.)
Unfortunately, it doesn’t tell you the ham’s e-mail address. So, unless you’re actually going to do a print mailing (which can cost a lot of money), you’ll have to look up e-mail addresses. We did this by inputting the calls into the appropriate forms at QRZ.Com and the World Wide HamCall Callsign Server.
Doing this, we were able to find e-mail addresses for about 25% of the hams on the list. That’s not very good, but not too bad, either. And those who haven’t gotten around to adding their e-mail addresses to either of these databases are probably not that active anyway, and therefore, not really good membership candidates anyway.
Finally, we created a Yahoo Groups mailing list for prospective members and invited them to join the list. About 10% of those we invited actually joined the list, and one person actually joined the club. I hope we’ll do better as time goes on, but it didn’t take us all that long to do, and we do have mailling addresses should we decide to pay for a postcard mailing.
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