This is all good stuff guys. The discussion shows everyone is passionate about the club and that can’t be anything but good. No one gets involved to make things worse right?
With that said, we know there is lots to do to make improvements and I think we have taken considerable strides in a very short period of time. Consider this club is only a few years old and compare it to some of the other clubs. I think we are holding our own pretty well.
I am a Board member and one of my tasks is governance. I led a good deal of the planning sessions last year and we really moved forward quite a bit. Our challenge is that this takes a lot of work to pull together and as mentioned before we all work paying jobs.
I have been reluctant to push too much administration on the Board over the past few months because they are car guys too and are involved for the very same reasons the rest of you are…to enjoy cars. None of us get off on administrating the club.
One of the major tasks we have to take on is formalizing how we run the various events and activities we have. If we create, for example, a track day operations manual we will then have documentation to share with other members so they can learn how to run the events as well. Not only that, we want to pass that along to the guys in Calgary too so that part of the club can grow. We want to create the same thing for cruises, dyno days, the alberta meet, shows, etc.
The hard part is finding the time. You have to be patient with us. It is not that we are not welcoming input, aren’t open to your involvement, or think things don’t need improvement. It is just that we are only keeping up with what we have on our plates now and need your patience and understanding. Keep the suggestions coming in…it is all good stuff.
In the mean time, remember your annual fee is only 20 bucks and even with our flaws that we are trying to address, the membership is still a pretty damn good deal.
I was at Hawrelak Park right at 5. I drove three loops and did see nissans that either did not look to be club cars nor did I see anyone making any attempt to look for other club members. If this was one of you, it would have helped if there was an effort made to flag down others…no one waved me over.
I could have missed some people perhaps.
I decided that driving in circles was futile (as is resistence apparently) and attempted to find a place where there was lots of parking. I staked out an area on the circular road just past the main parking area so people entering the park would come across me relatively quickly in their loop of the park.
I then hoped that others looking for the club would have taken some initiatve and seeing that no one was where they were at, would get in their cars and drive around. We even sent around another club member to gather people to our staked out location while one of us stayed put.
I waved over everyone that came by my location and almost waved over some others that were not club members. If you sat in your car in a full parking lot and made no attempt to find anyone else assuming everyone would come to you then oops we missed you.
I will point out five things that affected this event:
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We didn’t even think about the crowds that would be at the Park and that made finding a location difficult
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some of you did not read the details and went to Kelseys or other locations instead of Hawrelak park
3)the club can’t control who decides to come to the event so if turnout is low it is beyond our control. Each event we have there are lots of people that say “I’ll be there” and don’t show up. :shrug:
- We have, out of habit always had our monthly meet on first sunday night of each month with only one exception (to avoid an Oilers game in May) yet guys tend to be surprised by the announcement of the details, “oh man if I only would have known about this sooner I would have cleared my schedule.”
5)People tend to ignore our posted start times. When we post that we are meeting at a particular time and people show up nearly an hour later or more it affects our event. What happens is the on time people are pissed that they show up when they are supposed to and then leave because participation is low. Then the late people show up and say, “how come no one is here?” Or worse, we do leave on our cruise or whatever as per the published time and then people say things like, “I got there late and no one was there.” :wall: Having said that it is hard to leave on a club event from a particular location and a specified time with 4 guys in attendance.
3)We can’t control individuals that decide to ignore attempts to get them gathered and instead decide to go hide at the back of the park with the sterioid freaks WHERE THERE IS NO PLACE FOR ARRIVING CLUB MEMBERS TO PARK while the rest of us are in another locaiton in the park WITH LOTS OF PARKING doing everything we can to bring the group together. :yernuts: I think this is my first official profanity here on the site but that was really FUCKING frustrating. People come to a club event and then fuck off on their own. Not much the club organizers can do about that.
