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From: rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang)
Newsgroups: comp.org.acm
Subject: Re: membership/ideas  >sigh<
Summary: A few more suggestions (where to focus, etc.)
Message-ID: <RANG.91Apr30210359@nexus.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 1 May 91 01:03:59 GMT
References: <1991Apr29.003148.7270@athena.cs.uga.edu>
Sender: news@msuinfo.cl.msu.edu
Organization: UW-Madison CS department
Lines: 43
In-Reply-To: greg@athena.cs.uga.edu's message of 29 Apr 91 00:31:48 GMT

In article <1991Apr29.003148.7270@athena.cs.uga.edu> greg@athena.cs.uga.edu (Greg Whitlock) writes:
>I am a member of our ACM club here at the University of Georgia and
>I was really shocked when I attended my first ACM meeting here.
>The turn out (so I thought) was awful.  Maybe ten to fifteen people
>showed up.

  Yeah.  When I moved from a school with 4500 students to one with
45K, the turnout went from about 30 to about 5.  (Though in the next
two years, we got our active membership to about 40, with another 100
or so less active members.)

>We are about to start a membership drive but we aren't sure who to
>focus on.  Of course, the obvious choices are CS students but what
>can we do to make the ACM appealing to NON-CS students?

  I'd advise focusing on CS students first, until you've got enough to
run the publicity machine you need to get at the non-CS ones--it's
easier to convince a CS student to join than a non-CS student.  Try to
get both graduates and undergrads involved, if you have both.

  For non-CS students...try to decide what kind of group(s) you want
to reach.  Perhaps there are students who do programming in other
departments (physics, chemistry, economics...); you may be able to get
speakers in either from those departments, or outside speakers on
related topics.  (Perhaps a "computers in physics" lecture series, one
lecture per quarter?)

  Another big group, though it's hard to reach, is the people who just
*use* computers--maybe for word processing, or spreadsheets, or
whatever.  It's usually hard to get these people to stay involved, but
you may be able to garner publicity (and funds :-) by giving away or
selling "intro to WordPerfect" documents, or the like.  It'll spread
the word that you exist, if nothing else--and there are always
computer hobbyists who are not CS majors, who are good people to try
to get involved.

  Think about SIGs--maybe a Macintosh SIG, IBM SIG, UNIX SIG.  You may
be able to get more focused in smaller groups like that, and attract
more people than would go to general ACM meetings otherwise.  Who
knows...it's tough to find members, especially if you're competing
against a lot of other clubs.

	Anton
   
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison | "VMS Forever!" |
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