Initial Membership Development Feedback

There are a few consistent themes in the dozen or so feedback I have gotten from members, renewing members, and non renewing members:

• the club does not actively reach out to membership, a side effect not mailing the newsletter
• very little social interaction between members at meetings
• the same faces all the time, with little interaction
• no proactive notification to renew other than attending the meeting, stumbling across the newsletter
• non interaction on the web site
• Thursdays conflict with other interests, need to have something other than Thursday occasionally
• club meeting location far from my home, I work on the other side of the county and beyond
• ability to meet and get help from others with similar interests
• club dues are high compared to other clubs

These comments are not far from those at recent meetings.

I really think there is low hanging fruit here for how we as a club evolve and respond to this feedback.

As I get more feedback, I will summarize key points.

Then moving forward we can put together an action plan of quick wins and longer term development activities.

73

Doug NA1DX

Given the limited space at the club I'd like to suggest a streaming video/audio feed of presentations. This would also help with members who are further away from Davidsonville.

While I don't find the club dues particularly out of line with other area clubs, I do know of other clubs (not necessarily radio) that give hardship discounts. Also some clubs give reduced dues to members who get other members to sign up or give dues reductions in return for work.

Another possible means of increasing membership is to provide remote access to HF equipment. I know some people don't have the room to install equipment and some can't afford it.

One other item: If we had teleconferencing capabilities for the meetings we could also use it to open up license classes to more remote members. The available classes I'm seeing are all now here in the central part of the state, Davidsonville, Rockville.

That is a great idea, but we don't have any real internet service available at this time to the club facility.

Doug NA1DX

Wasn't Jonathan looking at internet service for the clubhouse?

Do any of the other tenants on the property have internet service?

Will
KA3UQQ

Right now we are using a WiFi Link to a member's residence for Internet service. This connection is not reliable. No other organization at the DFRC has Internet Service. The County does not seem to be interested in providing Internet Service to the DFRC or it's members.

But in case you don't know Sprint, in an agreement with the FCC when getting additional bandwidth, has very affordable WiFi Hot Spots available for 501(c)(3) corporations like the AARC. This arrangement was set up to provide places like public libraries with inexpensive access, but the law applies to all 501(c)(3) corporations. Such service would cost us only $120 yearly, plus the one time cost of purchasing the WiFi Hot Spot unit itself for somewhere close to $100. The $120 is a yearly fee, paid all at once prior to the service being turned on. Of course such service may be subject to disruption during emergency situations when cell phone channels are in 100% use.

The Board discussed this possibility early in the year, and opted not to take advantage of it, due to this drawback. However, it is my opinion that Internet in general is unlikely to function correctly in real emergency situations, so this may be a moot point. I would love to hear other's opinions on this topic.

PS: No we don't have DSL.

That's certainly a good price for a hot spot but I wonder what bandwidth you get.

"Unlimited" plans are relatively cheap now. I put unlimited in quotes because most of them seem to do some form of throttling when you reach a given limit.

I also don't know enough about streaming video to say whether multiple connections are going to add to your bandwidth need linearly or whether some multicasting is used. I assume this depends on what service/application is used.

I think from past experiences, that yes, mobile phone circuits get become over-used in an emergency but the Internet itself seems reliable enough. I base this on the experience of people in New Orleans during hurricane Katrina. I wasn't thinking of Internet connectivity from the club of course for Ecomm, only education/information/security.

Bonding multiple ISP connections into a larger single connection for video is a no go. Back in the day ISP's would do this with ISDN, (as long as you had two connections from the same provider) but they've long since gotten out of the practice.

Sites like Twitch, Youtube Live or even Facebook will proxy your single stream through their network and handle the heavy lifting on their end as long as you have enough throughput to get the original stream out.

They could also be recorded and posted, but that's a tremendous amount of work.

I believe membership would be active if meetings were on different evenings of the week. I think Thursday and Tuesday would provide members with some choice and increase activity...