As the Michigan Section Affiliated Club Coordinator, I need to send e-mail to all the clubs in Michigan from time to time. To do this, I need to generate a list of all the clubs with an e-mail address. To generate this list, I have been going to the affiliated clubs search page on the ARRL website, generating a list of clubs in Michigan, and then picking through that list manually for e-mail addresses. As you can imagine, this is a pain.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was asked by our Section Manager to se what I could do about getting inactive clubs back into the fold. “Inactive clubs?” I asked him. “How do I find a list of inactive clubs”?
He replied that I could get this information from a page on the ARRL website. I had never heard of such a page, so he got Rose-Ann Lawrence at ARRL HQ to send me the URL to the Big Club list page.
Cool! Not only will this page give you a list of active clubs and inactive clubs, it will also feed this information to you in comma-delimited, ASCII format. That feature lets you feed the data into a spreadsheet or database and slice it and dice it any way you want.
Since my immediate need is to generate a list of e-mail addresses for club contacts, I developed a program to do just that. At first, I thought I’d just feed the data into a spreadsheet and write a macro to get e-mails, but then it occurred to me that with a touch of programming, I could make this useful for all ACCs. Click here to generate an email list for clubs in your section.
Each club record actually contains four email addresses, a club address, a club contact address, the club president’s address, and the club’s newsletter editor’s address. What my program does is find the first e-mail address from a record and then add it to the generated list. If a club record has no e-mail addresses, then nothing is added to the list.
Anyway, try it out, and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your suggestion for making it better.
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