Once upon a time, user groups earned money by buying diskettes in bulk and reselling them to their members.  It was a win-win effort – the members got cheap diskettes and the club made a few cents per diskette.

Times have changed.  Storage media is now available to everyone at commodity prices, and user groups need more money than such sales ever generated in order to support ever-increasing member benefits.

It’s time to think outside the traditional money box!

Here’s an idea that has worked well for Cajun Clickers Computer Club of Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  It can be easily adapted for smaller groups.

When the Clickers were asked for about the billionth time, “What’s making my computer run so sluggishly?” they saw an opportunity to help their members while making a little money to support club activities.

Cajun Clickers hosts a PC Optimization Day six times a year. Members are invited to make an appointment on a Saturday with one of our volunteer “experts” to optimize and tune-up their computers.

A room in the training center is set aside and manned with about a dozen of their best technical folks.  Each station has keyboard, mouse, monitor, a checklist of utilites to run and tasks to perform to clean up and optimize a machine, and a CD containing the needed utilities.

Participating members bring in their towers and can stay and watch and ask questions if they wish.  The spirit here is “teach while you tune.”

Each machine is scanned, and cleaned if necessary, for viruses, Trojans worms, and spyware. The system tray is cleaned out, scandisk is run, unneeded programs are uninstalled, and the participant gets instructions on how and when to run defrag.  Often updated drivers are installed.  The members are instructed on how and when to update Windows, anti-virus software and other software.

The cost for this service is $20.  Clickers produces a shareware CD each year which contains many of the utilities they use during the optimization, and most members also decide to buy their own copy of the CD for $5.

The club averages $500-600 each time they offer PC Optimization Day.  Many members are so happy with this service that they use it several times each year.  Cajun Clickers is careful to emphasize in their promotion of the event that this is NOT for repairing broken computers, but for optimizing or tuning-up computers that already work fine.

Cajun Clickers has its own training center with tables and extra monitors, etc.  But a smaller group could simply use the same room they use for meetings and have each member of the “tech team” bring his or her own monitor, keyboard and mouse for use during the event.

Clickers has fine-tuned this event over a period of several years.  Here are a few tips they offer to make things run smoothly:

• Schedule each tune-up for a full hour.  Cleaning up viruses can take more time than you expect.
• If you want to have 3 appointments per hour, make sure you have 4 or 5 workers on hand, and at least 4 work tables set up.  You will need them as you start to lag behind.
• If possible, have one person (not necessarily high-tech) whose job is just to check people in.  If you can get extra monitor/keyboard/mouse setups, have this person hook up machines as they come in and begin running scandisk.  This can help the tech stay on schedule.
• Make this event by-appointment only.

Just like the old diskette sales, this event is a win-win effort!  Members get a valuable service at low cost and, at the same time, learn how to better maintain their own machines.  And the computer club gets much-needed extra income for providing more and better member benefits.