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AMERICAN RADIO RELAY
LEAGUE
AMATEUR RADIO WEEK June 19-26
HT to Work Day June 21
FIELD DAY June 25-26
2005 PUBLICITY
While Field Day is not until the end of June, many clubs and PIO's are already planning their media and PR activities. It is most encouraging to see the energy and drive shown by the PIO's to use this year in a special effort to bring Amateur Radio into the public consciousness. The field has been plowed by the PSA's and now is the time to plant the seeds. To make it as easy as possible, here are sample documents for you to use. Many are "fill in the blanks" and others can be easily modified to fit your local situation.
1. Publicity Tip Sheet:
2. Releases:
3. Media Preparation and Follow-up: Helpful tips
4. Contact!:
5. PR Email forum
6. Radio Public Service Announcement:
7. Backgrounder - What is Amateur Radio?
8. Backgrounder - Amateur Radio Emergency Communication:
9. Backgrounder -- Ham Radio Licenses:
10. ARRL Fact Sheet:
11. PIO Field Day
12. Field Day To-Do List
13. Bring your HT to Work Day
14. Invitation Sample:
Tuesday June 21, 2005
What's that?
The very best Amateur Radio recruiter is a ham.
On June 21st we are encouraging all hams in the US that have an HT to take it with them to work. Wear it on your belt, put it on your desk or some other place where your co-workers can see it. We hope that it will raise curiosity and questions. This is a chance for you to talk to them about ham radio! At lunchtime, show them how it works. Make some contacts while they are watching. Even better, let them talk on the radio! Then invite your co-workers to come see you at Field Day weekend. There they can meet even more hams, see a full station in simulated emergency operations, learn more and get information so that they too can get their Technician license.
When it's all done, just mail in a report to:
List four things:
What else?
There will be monitors on various repeaters randomly scattered throughout the country. If you are heard during the lunch hour of 12 to 1 (your local time) participating in HT Workday, showing your radio to a non-ham, you just might have one of the special monitors come back to you telling you you've just won a new ARRL Repeater Directory.
And...
W1AW will be running via echolink and also checking into repeaters and sites across the country during their lunch hour of 12 to 1 p.m. local time. Bear, from the Christmas Toy Drive, and his friends will be giving away Repeater Directories to hams participating in HT Workday.
Summary
This is a chance to have a lot of fun, recruit new hams, invite people to Field Day, get publicity, and show off Amateur Radio. Many people would like to have the capabilities of ham radio in a crisis but don't know where to start. The best recruiter is another ham who can show, guide and explain how to get their Technician license, then link them to the right people in your area. I hope you have fun and make the most of it!
TJ's Insights -- Still one of the most practical sites for PIO's is TJ's. While you may not be interested in the other areas, the "Insights" are usually very good and appropriate for what we're doing.
Don't forget to honor the people that make a difference to your organization and community during National Volunteer Week, April 17- 23.
Media Release
Your Name
Your phone #
Other contact info
Ham Volunteers in Your Town
Town, ST, Date -Each year hundreds of thousands of Americans volunteer their time and energies for the improvement and safety of their communities. Mechanics turn into firefighters when the alarm sounds. Hairdressers become EMT's . Engineers turn into auxiliary police.
America has a long and proud history of these "Minutemen" who answer the call to service in times of emergency.... And thousands of them are "Hams!"
The Your Club is among the hundreds of Amateur Radio groups nationwide that provide free emergency communications services in crises. Through their affiliation with the ARRL, the national association for Amateur Radio, hams provide radio communications capabilities for the American Red Cross, Salvation Army, National Weather Service, DHS Citizen Corps, and many state and local emergency agencies.
In the Your Town area, the club has also provided help to list a few key activities.
Like volunteer firefighters, hams provide this skilled service freely to their communities. "Being an 'amateur' means we do not accept payment, but there's nothing second rate about the skills involved," said club spokesman. "We're volunteers serving our community."
Even in recent years, Amateur Radio communications remained critical in many situations when other systems were destroyed, failed or overloaded.
When sending pictures, do NOT include them as attachments to unsolicited email press releases. Note that they are available, and see if they are wanted. If you just attach them, your release may get automatically tossed out as possible spam or a virus.
Volumes can be written on photo resolution needed for various media.
Here's the rule-of-thumb from Pat Mullet, KC8RTW, Michigan Section PIO.
Ideally when providing photos on CD, you want to keep the photos physically as large as practical, as high a resolution as practical. If possible, keep the photos in a lossless format such as .tif. If you must work in .jpg, do not change the compression level. You can always edit and compress the original later, but keep all the detail you can in the original. If possible, when including logos, include versions in vector formats (.eps, .ai) so they can be resized without being subjected to the jaggies.