This is a good question which I suspect many people wonder about. A lot of good things seem to quietly go on within the sections, which perhaps we could publicize better.
I recently ran a search on NASA ADS for refereed articles featuring John Rogers (Jupiter Section) as a co-author, and was really impressed by the number and range of papers which came back. John’s publication record is better than that of many professional astronomers I could think of. It’s not just John – if you key in the names of other leading BAA observers, you likewise get impressive lists of papers.
There have been proposals to put together an up-to-date summary of the BAA’s ProAm activities somewhere, which I think would be very welcome.
Another idea was to have a “Projects” area of the website, summarising ProAm observing projects people can get involved in. My only hesitation there is that many BAA members may not be that advanced yet, so it’d be nice to advertise easier options as well and have something for everyone to get involved in (including a paragraph about how the observations might be used). Perhaps rather than running one Observers Challenge on the homepage every few weeks, we should encourage all the sections to have a few of them, which run indefinitely. We could still pick one to feature on the front page each month.