The Club !

Hi all ,

As you know I was on the committee for just over a year, in that time there was only one meeting on Skype various emails and only a handful of people attended the AGM.
I never renewed my membership which was terrible for a committee member but was so disappointed with the members, the club is in decline due to the lack of input from members ( Rob has done his best but he is a young lad with a life, and he was not getting one, having to do the mag etc).
This brings me on to the Mag and the cost of membership, the Mag is out dated and not required ( now there is the members that don't have internet ) so why do we have to subsidise them. The fees show be reduced or the £15 non uk non mag membership should be offed to the UK ??
Ewan is now back on the case so I don't really know him but I believe he has a really good passion for the X so let's modernise the club and make it a good place to be again.
Apoliges if my grammar or spelling is poor I am not a writer

Kind regards

Michael

I have been saying this for the last two years(dismissed by the committee),the magazine is a un-needed expense and as i have said a few times before other clubs like the mr2 mk1 club charge £10 per year and have no magazine if they can live without i am sure the x1/9 owners club can live without it,£15 per year will see people come flocking back,very good point brought up you Michael

Both valid points. Before myself and Steve Sharpe joined the Committee, the club was losing money left right and center and if it had stayed that way, would have ceased to exist withing a couple of years. Keeping an eye on the costs allowed the club to make a small profit last year and secured things financially.

I would support a reduced membership fee and this is being discussed next Thursday night during a Skype meeting. My time serving the club has always been active. I joined in 1999, became RO in 2006, became editor after Mark and Chairman about 15 months ago. Support hasn't been great off everyone but off some, fantastic. There are other members like Juliet and more recently, Ewen who have really put the effort in for the benefit of others (and still continue to do so). I would love to step down from the roles and have a break but I do it to keep things going.

So if the mag goes, the costs are reduced significantly - fantastic. Lets say we set the membership fee at £15 or even £10. Would people join? Maybe for the first year- excellent.

What would make members join the following year? What would the club offer to members that non members don't already have. Non members have access to most of the forum, technical questions are posted in news and views and if that fails there is also the facebook group. That complied with Xweb means there is no real need to pay anything.

The risk of membership numbers falling does not change, indeed it might even speed up the process of reduced numbers. The club cannot exist without any form of revenue.

I'm very sorry to hear about the troubles within the structure of the club as I think we all would agree on the broad aim of promoting the virtues of the X19 - the issues are how we do it?
My previous cars have all been of the unusual type (Gilbern, Jensen Healey, etc) and if it is of any comfort all these clubs had the same issues, not a big enough pool of members to fill the various roles taking into account the fluctuating time available to individuals, clashes of personality, changes in car ownership, etc etc. One of the problems is that when people vote with their subscription the club often doesn't have good intelligence why they have moved on.
I would caution thinking that a reduced joining fee would necessarily increase membership as for most of us the fee is a small amount to add to out general X19 running costs, any cost is considered too high if you are not getting value for money
Can I suggest that a possible productive way to look at the issues is as an impartial outsider - if you were to set up the club again would you do it as a one make club, would you have the same structure, would you join forces with another club, what has the collective X19 ownership got to offer? Anything that increases the numbers (and that would by default create a bigger financial resource) available to promote the X19 even if their first interest is another Fiat/Lancia/Bertone/whatever car.

Now I'm not a member & have never been, so feel free to ignore my comments if you wish, but for what it's worth, here goes.
The days of subscriptions & magazines are just so 80's, fine then, but the web has killed it.
I accept some people don't have internet , but it must be a tiny minority & the only way for clubs to work today, is for them to just be free web forums.
There is just so much free stuff out there that charging a fee is never gonna work for long. There are plenty of free 'pro boards' & the like to host a forum & then owners can just sign up & post, it is the ONLY way today. I guess it's just progress & the ones that don't embrace it will be left behind.

Hi i have had x1/9s for just over 20 years now and i used to be a member way back then, and back in those days the magazine was a great and only source of valuable information but unfortunately for the mag the internet in my opinion has killed it, as been pointed out by the above posts everything that you need to know technical or otherwise is a few clicks away. Recently I have got back into x1/9s and I have posted one or two items on the forum and got in touch with the x1/9 community which is open to non members like myself which is great. My point is this,we all love our x1/9s and as the years go by the number of x1/9s will dwindle as they have over the years so we need to keep the x1/9 community together and maybe we need to adapt to the times, and so this is just a thought perhaps we should be looking at it as a x1/9 community and not as a club anymore, that doesn't mean no more meets and such like those things can still carry but be open to every x1/9 enthusiast. Recently I have had communications with Michael Erskine about a purchase, and it is guys like him and all the others currently running the club we need to keep onside because they offer vast knowledge and are always willing to help and above all friendly. I am now going to press the submit button.

maybe the answer is a online magazine delivered to paying members personal email address or it could be downloaded from a private section on this forum by paying members only,in this form the magazine would only cost time and not money

I have to agree that although it is quite nice to have a read of something on paper, a paper club mag is an outmoded medium. Even if it went pdf it is still a very hard job to put one together since there is so little material to work with.

The club nowadays really needs to have a strong web presence. Facebook is great for chat and organising get-togethers and the like, but a forum is the best way to have a repository of technical knowledge that is readily available and searchable.

It is very hard to make anyone pay a sub if there are no real tangible benefits of paid membership. I don't think technical help can be a subscription service since help is available for free elsewhere (if you have the patience). However, club discounts from suppliers and perhaps a pool of specialist tools could maybe be a paid-for benefit. A commitment from the club to answer technical questions in a timely and accurate manner might also be something owners might be willing to pay for.

The other issue is making the forum a friendly and welcoming place for novices and newcomers. For instance, it's not very nice for one's posts to be met with a torrent of abuse. There needs to be a firm and mature-minded grip on the forum as it is the face of the club that most people see these days. It is very myopic to think that because nobody complains nobody is offended - casual visitors and long established enthusiasts alike simply go elsewhere.

Or maybe paying a subscription fee just to access the website, in that way if you abuse the forum you lose it. I know face book is part of the times but if that link was dropped maybe more traffic would be feed through the website. I hope my last post did not give the impression that I am against paying anything, it is just that the internet is a free of charge monster that is hard to fight.

Quite so Cameron, that's why I think the club should look at tangible benefits like those I suggested.

Nobody can be made to pay for what is readily available elsewhere. However, the club could "guarantee" that technical info and advice can be expected in a reasonable time span, and can be relied upon, if the right people are charged with providing that service.

I do agree with the technical advice, because back in the early days when I was rebuilding a 1300 I rang the technical officers or whatever they were called to get me out of sticky point and even now sometimes myself I need a second opinion for silly problems.

For me the website is far too complicated and I think if the club is going to continue a simple forum like the Xforum is sufficient. Also the facebook page generates a lot of traffic and interest. Drop the mag, too much work, not enough input and although I do like to read it really it's not worth the stress and pressure of someone trying to put it together. All of this stuff can be posted on the forum. Open up the forum to everyone and get all X1/9 owners together.

Meets are few and far between due to the diversity of where people are physically located. So it's never going to be like bigger clubs where people ac actually get together of a monthly basis for a drive out.

The bitching and fighting has really p**sed me off. No need for it. It nearly destroyed the club a couple of years ago and will do the same again if it continues. The club is meant to be about the car and keeping it on the road and enjoying it as a collective. Not about personal arguments and battles.

Drop the mag. I

Terry is absolutely right the xweb is an amazing site it really is the best around there is no joining fee but i do believe they ask people to make a donation so maybe it would be a good idea to find the total costs of running the forum, show these costs and people can see the target go down as each donation is made this way the clubs forum survives without having to rely on memberships that people only want because they like the magazine assuming they wont renew with the mag discontinued,some people dont like change but if the club is to survive it needs to change and keep up with modern day mans/womans demands, the facebook group every so often puts up a link to this forum. As Terry pointed out the bitchiness is not good for this forum it was horrendous a couple of years back the only solution to stop this is 2 strikes and your out for 6 months i had to ban people from the facebook group and others who had left because of the baddies came back and we are now heading for 900 members because its all about the cars not peoples ego's and bullying/insults etc are not tolerated and this forum should apply the same rules,i have been a member of this club on/off since 1994 and none of this infighting existed then so get it back to the fun days it used to be and maybe members who have left will come back too

It's almost hi and bye from me as my car is on ebay this week and already at reserve. Nothing personal about the car or club of course! I've been a comittee member on one club and also been a happy contributor of time and money to others. The internet has revolusionised old car ownership but oddly seems likely to kill off many clubs which were happily functioning long before it came along. I think for the X19 club there is a combination of two things:

1. People (in the main) don't see the point of paying a fee to remain loyal to one club. They can dip in and out of many different forums / facebook groups anywhere in the world and pick up the banter and information they want at no cost or committment.
2. I think for the X19 club there just aren't enough cars out there to make a viable club in the traditional sense. I belong to the Peugeot Sport club which encompasses many thousands are cars both old and new. Guess what .. in my region we are doing well to get 5+ cars to a few shows each year. They do have a very good mag but it is a professional affair subsidised by Peugeot UK.

My advice .... stop beasting yourselves up and use any surplus reserves to maintain a free forum for as long as possible. Gear your events around other Italian car days (Goodwood, Beaulieu, Thruxton etc etc) which are often free to attend and attract loads of people who will love your cars. Mainly, stop beating yourselves up because the club isn't the same as it was ... not many are!!

Good luck one and all and hopefully I'll see you again at shows.