Topic: How (not?) to run a car club

[gilescooperuk]

For those of you who aren't aware I spend quite a but of time organising / running a small regional car club in the UK.

Now to ordinary members clubs seem like this mythical beast which churns out amazing (I hope) newsletters and organises events for them all to attend. However the truth behind the scenes can be rather different.

Our club was formed in sometime on 1999 - I don't have the exact date as it was before I was involved. It was formed by two people (neither of whom have anything to do with the operation now) I met one of them about 6 times and the other once I think. However it does seem to have been run in a very strange method because the first newsletter didn't appear until May 2000.

The best I can do for membership is that up to the end of 2000 the club had 25 members - as of October 2000 I took over the newsletter production and then things changed around. For a start the information we had on the members was sparce - no complete addresses, phone numbers, email etc. So we had to try and overhaul this. There was also at the same time a committee formed consisting of treasurer, editor (me), chairman, and events organiser.

For 2001 membership grew slightly to 30 members (10 new and 5 resigned their membership)

For 2002 membership figures plummeted - during 2001 the decision was taken that the club could no longer support a printed newsletter (probably due to the ridiculously low £5 annual membership fee which didn't cover the stamps let alone the printing costs!) and the decision was taken to put everything on line unless people could justify why they wanted a printed copy. As a result of this we had a mass resignation! I think we lost a third of the members leaving us with about 20 - after various arguments amongst the committee we went back to a printed newsletter permanently. The membership fees also went up to £6 (extortionate I know). We also lost our first events organiser and had to recruit a second one.

For 2003 we stabilised and went back to 30 members approximately.

For 2004 we started growing fast 30 new members signed up! and only 8 resigned leaving us with 52.

For 2005 we added another 28 members and only 10 resigned leaving us with 70. We also put the membership fees to £10 as we were running low on club funds. For the first time we actually had reserve funds to build on the clubs reputation. However one of the resignations was the Events Organiser - he had tried to organise a treasure hunt with various clues on a Saturday followed by an overnight stay then head home on the sunday. The treasurer got wind of this and decided it wasn't ambitious enough. He wanted us to gather about 400 clues compile 20 or so routes all for no return. So we had to recruit another events organiser

For 2006 we added another 24 members and 12 resigned leaving us with 82. We also appointed a new Chairman as it had ended up with the treasurer taking on both roles.

For 2007 we only added 20 members and had 4 resign leaving us with 88. We also put the membership fees up to their current level of £12 due to stamps increasing in cost. However at the end of 2007 we had another problem as the existing treasurer went slightly bonkers as he thought there was a coup being organised against him. It resulted in him resigning and a lot of work to restore the organising committee's reputation as he tried to slander all of us!

Fortunately the damage wasn't that bad and in 2008 we lost 25 members and only recruited 25 through the year meaning for the first time we
had no change in the membership numbers. We had to do a committee reshuffle again and this resulted in us losing another events coordinator as he became the treasurer. So I took on the events role on a part-time basis.

In 2009 to date we had 23 members resign and only 20 new members so we are running at a total of 92. We also have gone full circle as with the old treasurer left our second events organiser has come back to his role.

So for a nice simple life join a car club - just stay clear of the organising committee roles.

[Ultra]

I was a member of one club for about a year and a half. Lesson learned.

[Allan L]

It all sounds depressingly familiar!
I've been a member of a one-make club for 50 years during which time I have been
General Secretary
Treasurer
Magazine Editor
Vice Chairman
Chairman

I'm also a member of a local "old car club" where I've only been Editor, but the game of musical officers has been much as you describe.

Years ago I was involved with a "normal" local motor club: faced with the downward spiral of having not enough members to make it worth running events and not enough events to make it attractive to new members, we halved the subscription (from £1 to £0.50 - it was in about 1970!) and got more members so scrambled back into proper existence.
Ten years later we were in the same boat, with the added problem that all our current members had been, or still were, on the committee and no-one wanted to carry on.
We therefore wound the club up.

[gilescooperuk]

It does make you think when you read through all the changes that have gone on - Why am I still involved with the club.

Mind you a lot of my friends are through the club and we always manage to pull through.

The worst bit is putting a load of effort into organising something and then having nobody turn up. But I think I found the solution to that - take a deposit from people when they turn up give them the deposit back. If they fail to attend then they have lost their money (believe me our members are so tight that the prospect of losing money they will attend no matter what!).

[MG]

the existing treasurer went slightly bonkers as he thought there was a coup being organised against him.

AHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHH!  That's beautiful!    Sounds a lot like running a website. Ask me how I know......

In the 70's, I was very active with a local car club. We held 8 rallies a year and 8 autocrosses. I organized my entire life around those events. It was great fun. But the curtain falls and time passes and now I find that there are almost no clubs left that do that sort of thing. Those that do exist are only interested in foliage tours and pot luck suppers and such.  SU carburetor beauty contests are high on the list as well. Liability and insurance issues make it almost impossible to find a location that will allow an autocross short of an actual race track anymore. And short of SCCA competition, no one seems to want to just go out for a nice TSD rally event that doesn't involve computers, GPS and flyovers by the Blue Angels at the start.  Most folks today wouldn't know a Curta Calculator - aka peppermill - if it bit them!   

There is an old expression that in every organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. But that gets refined even further that of that 20% who do something, only 20% of those do the real heavy lifting. Which means that if you have 50 members, only 2 (20% or 20%) are actually doing anything at all. The rest just show up for the beer. Or the bangers and mashed!    Which pretty much seems to describe your experience!   

[gilescooperuk]

the existing treasurer went slightly bonkers as he thought there was a coup being organised against him.

Well somewhere in the achives on this machine will be the original emails (now deleted) but I do remember it was a multi-coloured message!

As to organising stuff it is always an uphill struggle but with 100 members we do have 3 or 4 who organise most of the stuff. Add to that a core membership of 10-15 who will turn up to most events and the rest of them - well who knows....