[comp.org.acm] membership/ideas >sigh<

greg@athena.cs.uga.edu (Greg Whitlock) (04/29/91)

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.  I now know that that was a pretty good turn out.
When I attended Gainesville College (Oakwood, Georgia not Fla.),
we started a new ACM chapter and our membership was over twenty.
Think about it.  20 ACM members to 2800 students compared with
10-15 ACM members to 28,000 students!  What gives?  We can't seem
to get support around here.  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?

Last year our current head-honcho revived a dormant club with hopes
of making it active, alive, and backed with support.  He created
the Classic City Computing Conference which received great support
from local businesses but failed to attract the needed public.
Putting on a conference of the magnitude of the last one isn't an
easy task with such little support.  So, if anyone out there has
a brain storm on how to draw in just a few (say 10 to 30) more
members, PLEASE let me know.

We are about to put on a campus wide programming contest, we are
starting to plan the next conference, and have a few more ideas in
the works....

Also, if anyone's group puts out a newsletter or contributes a
weekly article in a local paper, email me so I can ask a few
questions about getting started.  We are trying to start a 
weekly or bi-weekly article in one of our two campus newspapers...

Thanks!

=============================================================================
Greg Whitlock                          | "Chivalry is not dead...
University of Georgia, Athens          |  it just got left holding the door."
Department of Computer Science         |
E-mail: greg@athena.cs.uga.edu         |                           -Greg (me)
-- 



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whites@unvax.union.edu (Shayne White) (04/30/91)

At Union College, in Schenectady, NY, our chapter generated some
publicity and $$ by selling T-shirts with some fractal graphics on the
back.

Shayne White (whites@unvax.union.edu)

rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) (05/01/91)

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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