Recently, Sam KC8QCZ and I were discussing how to promote our Field Day activity amongst the hams in our community. He mentioned that he had a listing of more than 500 hams in the Ann Arbor area, but that there were no e-mail addresses. We thought about mailing out a postcard, but ruled that out when we calculated that this would cost us over $125.
Our next thought was to look up email addresses on QRZ.Com and/or hamcall.net. That seemed like a lot of work, so I came up with the idea of writing a small program that would take the callsigns as input and programatically query these databases. While I think this is do-able, I doubt I’d be able to get to it for a while.
Finally, the idea hit me to ask our members to help out. If I got eight of them to say yes, then I could parcel out 50 names to each of them, and that should take them less than an hour each. I put out a request on the club mailling list this morning, and by noon, I had already gotten four volunteers. How cool is that?
The point I’m trying to make is that instead of just writing off a club project or activity as being too much work, ask some of the members to help out. A lot of people won’t volunteer their help unless there’s a specific need. Identify that need, and they’re eager to pitch in. The result is a win-win situation for everyone.
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