[CW] Re: CW digest, Vol 4 #370 - 7 msgs

[N2EY@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/30/04 4:23:41 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
mgemm@mtechnologies.com writes:


> Jim said--
> 
> >>What I find most interesting is that this is the first I'm hearing about
> such a survey. <<
> 
> It was probably in the minutes of the board meeting that approved it-- who 
> reads those?  Wait a sec-- QST stopped publishing minutes, didn't they?

Some of us protested that. I'm going to do so - again.


> 
> What I find interesting is they used member funds to pay an outside company 
> to 
> survey non members.  Either they don't trust their own ability to conduct an 
> 
> impartial survey or (more likely) they thought a commercial polling firm 
> would 
> lend some sort of authority to the results.  Why? 

Several reasons:

1) Using an outside company that specializes in it avoids any claim of bias 
or procedural error. This is standard procedure - ARRL elections are run by an 
outside outfit as well. No matter what the outcome of a survey, a lot of 
people are
going to be unhappy, and if it were done in-house the credibility of claims 
of cooking the books could be much greater.

2) Outside outfits do this sort of thing all the time, and so the probablilty 
of errors
is reduced and the time from start-to-finish is less.

3) It may actually save money to hire out such specialized work because the 
outside firm is allready set up to do the work. (Think of the last DIY job 
you did
where you had to learn how to do new things, and how much it cost. Then think 
of what it would cost if you had paid yourself for all of the time you spent 
on the project) Hq staffers are paid, so it may or may not be cost-effective 
to have them 
stuffing envelopes and such.


 No doubt so they can say to 
> 
> the FCC "this is what hams want" rather than just "this is what our members 
> want." 

Which makes a big difference to FCC! It also answers critics who would say 
that
since ARRL members are not a majority of hams, the survey should be 
discounted,
etc. 

Like it or not, regulators like FCC are going to take a READEX survey more 
seriously 
than anything ARRL could have done in-house. It's the nature of the govt. 
beast.  I
don't like it either but that's the way it is. 


 But of course they overlooked the first question, which should have 
> 
> been "do our members want us to spend  their money to find out what 
> non-members 
> want?" [g]
> 

Seems to me the *best* approach would be to analyze the data three ways - 
what 
members want, what nonmembers want, and what the community as a whole wants.
That way everyone can see whether or not their are big differences. 

I don't have any problem with my member dollars being spent on such a survey. 

Heck, if I'd known about it, I;d have contributed some extra $$ so that the 
sample could
be bigger and the results published in QST!

73 de Jim, N2EY


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