Controversial ideas...
Make the forum public.While keeping it private seems to continue to have the support of those on the forum, I think this forum ends up serving just a select group of members who visit on a regular basis. Keeping it closed might be great for them, but I don't think it is a positive thing for the club. I think opening it up could do the following...
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Serve as a recruiting tool. I suspect a number of people who are thinking about getting involved would love to lurk on the form to get a feel as to who we are and what we do prior to them pulling the trigger on their first event. Right now, if they are brave enough, they have to show up to event #1 pretty much blind. They have to figure out and navigate the entire "event experience", without knowing anyone. I suspect that most novices these days are here along with a friend that already is a member or have done this before elsewhere. How many just show up out of the blue? It also might be great for these same novices to show up Monday morning and to join in on the post event discussions. That experience and feeling of "belonging" may push them into deciding to join the club. I suspect that once in, they are more likely to stay.
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Help the track program. I think the track program may also be suffering somewhat due to the closed nature of the forum. If there is one part of THSCC that relies heavily upon non-members it is the track program. As far as I know there is no home for THSCC/TZC track program as far as an online forum is concerned. I have had a number of people ask to join the forum due to track related stuff (questions about events, looking to partner up with people on travel, etc.), but they are not particularly interested in joining the club (at that moment). I have to turn them away. So I suspect it just doesn't provide as nice as experience as it could.
I am no position to dictate how this would go down, but I feel pretty strongly that if we were to choose to do this that we should restart/relaunch the forum and not open this one up. This one could run in parallel for a few weeks to allow people to get access to IMs, etc. but it would then be shut down. Yes, we would loose a bunch of post history, but that looses value over time. I also am not a fan of a special "members only" section due to the headache associated with the upkeep (membership is always changing). However it would be relatively easy to keep private THSCC officers and Staff forums (invisible to you mere mortals already)
Better Membership Management and related proactive outreach.I hate to even bring up how we crash and burn each time we try to automate our membership system. While it may not initially increase event participation, it may help keep members from slowly drifting off on their own. Automatic renewals, email reminders, event reminders, etc. I don't want to spam people, but I see no reason to not reach out to people at least once a year to maybe let them know about the schedule, special events, or even to just remind them that their membership is about to expire. I think that I have received emails like this from the track program side of the club. This needs to be expanded.
Utilize modern social networking (and technology in general)This is not actually controversal and there seems to already be some great progress on this already. I haven't been to an autocross in quite awhile, but I think the work on pushing out results live is great. I also know there has been some work on Facebook. We need to keep that up. Should we setup a twitter account? I think that live tweets when something such as new FTD times are set at events might be cool? There could also be occasional tweets after events to direct people to post event discussion threads on the forum (one example). This is such a high tech area, we should be leading the pack nationally on how to do this.
Discuss...
Richard
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Richard Casto
1972 Porsche 914
2013 Honda Fit Sport
2015 Honda Fit EX
http://motorsport.zyyz.comMoney can't buy happiness, but somehow it's more comfortable to cry in a Porsche than a Kia.
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