Local Section Mailing List—More than Just Labels

What does your local section look like? Take a peek at the mailing list. So your local section wants to provide more meaningful events for your membership in an effort to increase meeting attendance. Perhaps taking a look at the local section mailing list will offer insight into your membership needs. With each distribution of mailing labels sent to the newsletter editor or secretary of the local section also comes a disk with some valuable information for the local section officer to consider when planning future meetings. One potential way to get more members attending events and fueling the supply of volunteers is to provide meetings that are targeted to members’ interests. The local section mailing list contains a variety of information nuggets for you to examine and consider for future events.

The information comes packaged on a floppy disk as a text file, which can easily be converted to either an Excel spreadsheet or Access database. This allows for easy manipulation of data and/or to create targeted mailing lists. For example, you can sort the document in spreadsheet format to sort by date of birth or place of employment. Then you can extract that information into mailing labels to targeted members of your local section.

A wealth of information about your section is available to you on the mailing list. For instance, there are two mailing addresses: a preferred address used by the ACS for mailings (this is the one that would appear on your local section labels) and a work address. Many of our members use their home address as the preferred address. By examining the work addresses, one could determine if some members you may not see at meetings are industrial, government, or academic members. This information might change the balance of what you consider your section to be and give you some hints toward events that may interest these members. For example, if only academic folks attend your dinner meetings and on the list you notice a large number of members from an industrial setting, you might want to arrange a meeting at an industrial site, with industrial focus, to attract these members into your fold.

The mailing list also contains all the electronic addresses that ACS has on record for your section. This information can assist you in starting or adding to your e-mail database and is helpful in communicating with your section. E-mail is free and a great way to further spread information about the great activities going on in all our sections.

Another category is ACS original join date. You don't have to wait for the Society's recognition of the 50-year members to celebrate a significant year of service. Maybe your section deems every 10 years significant or even every 5 years. Everyone enjoys and appreciates recognition. Why not call in the 10-, 20-, 30-, and 40-year members to a meeting and recognize them by some means?

Does your section have a WCC? Check out the list to determine the percentage of female members in your section. What about a senior circle/senior chemists group or YCC? Date of birth information is available to consider for events and activities. In Excel you can easily sort by date of birth and then invite your senior chemists to a brunch meeting on the topic of investments for seniors or invite them to participate in school visitation.

Other information includes field of study and degree status. Having a large number of B.S., M.S., or Ph.D. chemists in your section might warrant activities tailored to that group. Field of study gives information on the number of chemists versus chemical engineers, perhaps leading to a joint meeting with AIChE.

Finally, an important field is the listing of division membership. Each division is listed on the spreadsheet, and membership in the ACS divisions is outlined. With increased emphasis on LS/ division interaction, this might be a good starting point to open communication with a division, as well as developing programming. If these members are interested enough in a particular area of chemistry to join a division, perhaps they are also interested enough to come to and or assist in organizing a meeting.

If you haven't looked at the local section mailing list lately, now is a good time to give it some attention. You will find that it contains some valuable insights into the demographics and needs of your section.

Will Lynch
Chair, Technology, Tools and Operations Subcommittee
Local Section Activities Committee

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