<VV> What's in it for me?

[Karl Haakonsen]

Carl Kelson wrote:

"I don't join a club, any club with a view as what I can personally take from that club. I join a club to provide my support and in doing so to ensure that club survives. If the club survives then it will bring benefits to its membership. If you don't belong to CORSA then I have to question whether you are interested in the general publics awareness and interest in Corvairs, maintaining or improving your Corvairs value and perhaps most importantly educating the next generation who might buy your Corvair one day when for whatever reason you need to sell it."

This nails it on the head. People that need to be convinced or sold on 
what tangible, measurable thing we can give them in return for their $37 
or $45 will likely never join because they can have their Corvair, get 
their parts from vendors and their tech information from online forums 
and books and, well, they have plenty of friends anyway, so why bother 
nurturing a national car club for the people whom they don't know 
anyway. Do we really want to waste our time trying to recruit people who 
think like this?

Perhaps the one tangible thing is the CORSA convention which would not 
exist without CORSA, though some folks might think their own regional 
events like the Great Western Fan Belt Toss and Swap Meet or whatever is 
enough. But Carl said it succinctly as someone who really gets it. Ask 
not what your car club can do for you, but ask what you can do for your 
car club and the future of the car you claim to care enough about to be 
called a "fan" of.

Back to my Saturn club, the demographic is significantly younger than 
CORSA's. Some of the most enthusiastic people in our nascent attempt at 
creating a club are in their 20s. S-series Saturn cars haven't been made 
for 12 years.  Owners and fans of these cars have been able to get all 
the information they need from the forums for all these years and are 
not of the "joining" mentality for the most part, which is why it's 
taken so long to get a club idea to gain traction. But the people aren't 
excited about creating and joining a club to see what they can get out 
of it, but rather to do for Saturns as Carl so eloquently put about what 
CORSA does for Corvairs. People want to preserve the history of the 
cars, people are talking about a museum (I don't want to discourage them 
yet about how difficult this really is), and want a permanent 
institution to be the storehouse of knowledge, history and memorabilia. 
People want an organization that has enough of a presence to try to 
influence the availability of reproduction parts. Perhaps Saturn fans 
care more about their cars than Corvair fans do, but I doubt that.

It's as Joni Mitchell sang in Big Yellow Taxi, "Don't it always seem to 
go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone."

Karl in Boston
CORSA Eastern director
Bay State Corvairs
Stock Corvair Group
Corvanatics
1966 Monza convertible 110/PG project car