Even though the season is winding down your executive is still busy doing its best to program and make things happen next year.
Present:
Rob Metcalfe, Peter Ellsworth, Danby Crowder, Paul Ecke and Roger Curtis
Discussion:
- Our membership continues to grow. As odd as it may seem for someone to sign up so late in the year, it serves as a reminder that it’s not all about racing: there are discounts to be had at our sponsors as well.
- CASC-ON’s Annual General Meeting is coming up this November. Besides the usual business, this event provides clubs with the best chance to network and serve ideas up for next year. The executive is hoping to have a representative there.
- What does our membership want? The results of the club survey conducted earlier this year told us that there are three main areas of interest; namely, Lapping, Autoslalom and Driver’s Education. St LAC piggybacked with Shannonville autoslalom events to create a Club Championship (see earlier post for results), offered a discount to members for a Spring Lapping event and hopes to have something in place next season. This involved discussing venues, qualified trainers and the matter of finding cars. Hopefully we can make this happen. It may very well serve to allow would-be racers a chance to do a reduced licensing course as a result of satisfactory completion of our offering.
- Dealer Appreciation Nights were one of the club’s objectives for 2017 and much effort was made to see if this was possible. The club worked tirelessly to make something happen for the local BMW dealership (their idea) and we contacted Brack Driving Dynamics to put a proposal together. It was decided that going this route would be too expensive. It also helped us find avenues for such dealers including working with the BMW Club of Ontario. This led to thoughts about working with other car clubs to host an all-comers drivers education event (see above).
- The club will continue to pursue working with the schools in hopes of keeping the interest in automobile sports alive and well.
- The club had a request to add a forum to our web site. The Director of Communications will add the option for readers to comment on posts instead. This comes on the heels of our Internet Service Provider (ISP) asking for permission to delete the archived forum from web sites past as they are proving to be an avenue for hackers to gain access to mailing lists and the like. The request also made mention of our Facebook page not having an obvious portal to leave a comment or question. This is because such comments do not show up on the front page. The club continues to employ Twitter to pass along announcements. So far, we have four followers.
- Write-offs. When the new executive took over there was little in the way of records for things such as website hosting. As a result, the Director of Communication started from scratch including the finding of a ‘suitable’ ISP. Unfortunately, things didn’t work out as planned. After signing a three year contract with GreenGeeks.ca for hosting and site building software access we no sooner found out that we didn’t own the stlac.ca site name and efforts to port the site content seemed to be impossible. The funny thing was: the site continued to ‘work’. It turned out that Kingston’s GoSabe was not only still hosting our site but was still being paid to do so. Even though GoSabe offered to move everything over at a cost of about one-half an hour, their long term pricing was attractive enough to stay put. This led to a write-down of $350 US as GreenGeeks would not rebate any funds. Roger feels pretty crappy for all of this.
- Much discussion was made of other clubs’ plights and remedies. Or, why are some clubs experiencing great turnouts for events while others are not… Perhaps the CASC-ON AGM may yield the answers.
- There was no correspondence.
