<CORSA Chapters> Member participation

[aeroned at aol.com]

Thank you everyone for the replies. It seems our club's participation isn't much different from other clubs.


To come clean, we had a "new" member show up at a recent meeting saying the club had to change. He wanted us to do more things, different things than what we've been doing. Of course he hasn't participated in most of those events. We offered to "let" him plan an event but of course that was too much for him to do. He just wanted others to do everything he wanted. That is when he lost me.


Our monthly meeting begins with an unofficial dinner social. We then move to a local community center. It's a nice room in a nice building with it's own parking lot that we get for free. Sounds perfect for a car club, IMO. We meet on Saturday night. That has always been a concern of mine. Do we lose attendance because it's "date night?" Every time I suggest changing the night to a week night, it's overwhelmingly turned down. Of course that's by the folks that are there on a Saturday night.


On the plus side we have our Tunas, three times a year. These events are very successful and regionally (nationally?) famous. The success is 99.9% due to the hospitality of our host, Terry Kalp. The other 0.1% is the food, that's not an insult of the food.


I'm going to continue to work to make our club the best car club it can be. I will try my best to welcome new members into our club and not present them with a clique look. If I find any secrets on attracting new, younger members, I'll let you all know.


Ned



-----Original Message-----
From: Bryan Blackwell <bryan at skiblack.com>
To: aeroned <aeroned at aol.com>
Cc: chapters <chapters at corvair.org>
Sent: Wed, May 27, 2015 7:27 pm
Subject: Re: <CORSA Chapters> Member participation


Hi Ned,

Offhand it sounds like you're doing ok.  Our club has about 35
members (we don't break out family/individual) and we get generally 8 to 10 at a
meeting.  We see a half dozen or so at events within a day's drive.

I found
over the years that no matter what sort of meeting you have, there are some
people who won't come to the "normal" meeting.  I've had some luck by adding
other local events - we go to a local show and have a little picnic.  The show
is part of a larger festival in Manassas, so that is some draw.  Doing something
on a weeknight instead of the weekend, or vice versa, can help.  Doing things
with neighboring clubs can be a draw as well, seeing new faces is a plus.  At
the very least if they bring 5 and we bring 5, ten is a better crowd :-)

With
the state of most car clubs being somewhat smaller, it seems around here that
other clubs are much happier to have us come as a group to their events.  Some
of that I think is the wearing off of the "Nader effect", and some of it is they
have trouble getting people too.

--Bryan

> On May 27, 2015, at 2:01 PM,
Ned Madsen via Chapters <chapters at corvair.org> wrote:
> 
> I was just
wondering about club participation in other chapters. Here in Wichita we have
about 30 dues paying members. Some of these folks, I've never seen in my 15+
years in the club. We regularly get about 10 members at monthly meetings. We
might get that many to participate in a road trip event. We only get about 5 or
less to go to near by events outside our club. It doesn't sound like much, until
you look at the percentage.
> 
> 
> I'm wondering how other clubs do? Do you
get 30% of your members to show up at meetings or events? Is 17% a big number to
travel to other events?
> Do we have a problem or are we just a small club?