EMCOMM Groups: If You Aren't Doing, You're Dying

If your local group doesn’t have stuff going on, you’re dying. It’s just that simple.

The great killer of volunteer organizations is not having anything for the volunteers to do. If they don’t have something to do, your volunteers will find something else to do — like a more interesting and involving volunteer organization to work with. Let that happen long and often enough and it’s game over for your group.

Get Newcomers Involved Right Away

Years ago at the Red Cross, we made a rule that a newcomer had to be invited to every middle-of-the-night disaster callout, usually to help people who had just suffered a fire.

That policy was developed after Elionora and I joined and didn’t get a run for more than nine months! We ended up, over five years, taking too many runs, but that is a common Red Cross experience.

The point here is that if your new members don’t get to participate in “the mission” of your group very quickly they will become bored and leave. Volunteers join to do something, so find something for them to do.

Likewise your longtime members need things to do. Warning: Leaders can be suckered into thinking they have a functioning EMCOMM group when they really don’t. If you have a bunch of members that seem satisfied sitting around pretending to be ready but not doing anything, that is exactly what they are: pretenders.

We all know clubs that pretend to be ready for emergencies and wrap themselves in the warm glow of supposed “community service.” Sadly, the demographic shift in Amateur Radio (“Now older, slower than 20 years ago!”) is making this a common reality, I fear.

There is also what I will call “The CERT Challenge” in a future post that is part of the reason CERT, RACES/ARES/ACS and other volunteer responder groups need to band together.

Speaking of which…

One of the reasons we recently started California Emergency Volunteers is to offer training and participation opportunities to members of all volunteer emergency groups.

We have hams and CERT members mostly, but look forward to expanding beyond that base.

We organize training on our own and help other groups organize theirs, provided outsiders are invited to attend this shared training. Likewise events, where we encourage participation from outside the usual sponsoring group. In this way, we hope to improve training, encourage mutual aid and keep volunteers active.

Don’t Just Read This — Do Something!

You may not be able to do what we do — or may be able to do more — but anything you do (think real quarterly training and exercises) will improve skills and help retain members. And, by all means, work with everyone who will work with you.

This really is a case of “do or die.” 

Our Busy Calendar

I have just finished the first version of an 2012 events calendar for hams in my county. There is still more to add, but we already have more than 300 opportunities for hams to participate. Now, with four clubs, most of these are weekly nets and monthly meetings, but it also includes HamCrams, trainings, exercises and public service events.

Your group should have at least 72 events on its calendar. Here’s how I figure that: 52 weekly nets + 12 monthly meetings + 4 quarterly drills/exercises + Field Day + your state QSO Party + 2 public service events = 72. If you share events with other groups, your number could be significantly larger.

Get Up and Do Something

I am not trying to suggest that any group is better than any other, although I do believe there are some minimum standards that must be met if we are to truthfully offer EMCOMM to our communities. What I hope top do is merely encourage more groups to do more things and involve more people.

Every so often I will get an email from someone lamenting the state of their local EMCOMM group, usually a problem of well-established but atrophied leadership.

This is a simple problem to solve: Do something. Anything. Doesn’t have to be EMCOMM. Anything that gets your people together — monthly dinners, breakfasts, hidden transmitter hunts, whatever — can become the basis for revitalizing your group.

The most important thing you can do is organize HamCrams and create a new generation of emergency communicators in your community. If you want to talk about this, drop me an email. I plan to write a post about this but it may be longer than you care to wait.

In the meantime: Do something, OK?