Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

[Don H.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Member News is reachable by hovering on Home in tool bar above, then Site Map in the drop down, or click on Home then click on Services in the drop down, then click on Member News. Or, by clicking on Member News in the left column of links in footer below. And, as you say, there are no links to past meeting minutes.. Perhaps there will be in next version of this Board.. For now, when current meeting minutes are approved they will be posted in Member News, and also the Restorer magazine..

[Owen L.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

I guess they are not ready yet from the recent meeting? I have found nothing that shows minutes archived from previous meetings.

Yeah. I'm expecting a historical list of meeting minutes since Mike said, "The Board has been posting the full minutes ... for some time now."

I am also of the opinion that board meetings should be recorded. It's such a simple thing to do on Zoom or G-Meet. For executive session portions, just pause the recording and resume when over. I don't understand the resistance to doing so.

[Owen L.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Member News is reachable by hovering on Home in tool bar above, then Site Map in the drop down, or click on Home then click on Services in the drop down, then click on Member News. Or, by clicking on Member News in the left column of links in footer below. And, as you say, there are no links to past meeting minutes.. Perhaps there will be in next version of this Board.. For now, when current meeting minutes are approved they will be posted in Member News, and also the Restorer magazine..

Thank you Don. That's a pretty convoluted pathway to find it. Why not have a dedicated forum section called Member News? It could be an archive of past minutes, by-laws, etc., plus other "member news". If a true forum subsection, all postings to it will appear from the "New Posts" button - no need to go searching.

[Michael J.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Member News is reachable by hovering on Home in tool bar above, then Site Map in the drop down, or click on Home then click on Services in the drop down, then click on Member News. Or, by clicking on Member News in the left column of links in footer below. And, as you say, there are no links to past meeting minutes.. Perhaps there will be in next version of this Board.. For now, when current meeting minutes are approved they will be posted in Member News, and also the Restorer magazine..

Thanks Don!

[Don H.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Thank you Don. That's a pretty convoluted pathway to find it. Why not have a dedicated forum section called Member News? It could be an archive of past minutes, by-laws, etc., plus other "member news". If a true forum subsection, all postings to it will appear from the "New Posts" button - no need to go searching.

My only answer to this is that the program in use has certain limitations, AND, we do not have a full time, paid IT team.. We have a tiny (3 person) volunteer cadre of IT experts with no budget who fit in IT maintenance and upgrades as their own personal life commitments allow..We make do, the best we can, with what we've got.. And please remember, all minutes are posted in the Restorer magazine for all members to read, if they are interested.. I venture to say that the vast majority of members are not interested, just as the vast majority never visit the club website.

[Michael J.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Thanks Don, all very true. We have lots of members, and few who are active.

[Don H.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Can we assume members will no longer receive minutes of board meeting and no more live meetings recorded? I believe all members should be kept informed?

The minutes of the recent Annual Board of Directors Meeting are now posted on the Member News page.. Find the link to that page in list of links at bottom of this page, or under Services on the Home Page of this website. Home is in the large links above the club banner above. https://www.ncrs.org/docs/032124.pdf

[Owen L.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

I looked up this site on youtube. It has recently begun its 5th year, it has 3,910 subscribers (after FOUR YEARS?), and most of the episodes have less than 1,000 views, sometimes much fewer. The current episode #209 is 4 days old, has 3,700 views, 51 "likes", and only four comments. 209 episodes, (one a week for 4 years), and only 3.9k subscribers? The podcast doesn't appear very "popular" to me.

This is the first I've heard of the Corvette Today podcast or video channels.

I'm not sure if you can truly judge the advertising expense for a podcast on their YouTube content. The podcasts are about 30 minutes long but I don't see any download / listener data for each episode like YT provides. If they do indeed publish weekly, that is about $115 per episode. I can't say spending the $6k is a poor choice until I listen to a few episodes. Sometimes advertising expenditures are very hard to evaluate as may be the case here. Who knows if this won't pay dividends down the road...

It would be good if the podcaster was an NCRS member.

[Mark F.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Bill, The Board has been posting the full minutes from Board general session meetings on the Member News section of this discussion board for some time now. In addition, the summary minutes from those meetings are distributed to all of the Chapters with encouragement to share them with their members, and they are published in the Restorer magazine. The minutes from the Board's March 21, 2024, meeting will be posted in the Member News area as soon as the Board has finalized them with Board Secretary Larry Colvin. Mike

Member News is reachable by hovering on Home in tool bar above, then Site Map in the drop down, or click on Home then click on Services in the drop down, then click on Member News. Or, by clicking on Member News in the left column of links in footer below. And, as you say, there are no links to past meeting minutes.. Perhaps there will be in next version of this Board.. For now, when current meeting minutes are approved they will be posted in Member News, and also the Restorer magazine..

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[Tony S.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Dear Dave Perry:

Your Board of Directors voted 7-2 to approve a new and more dynamic approach to promoting and marketing the NCRS and the NCRS "brand". Your analytics are incomplete. The Corvette Today has both listeners and subscribers. The 3,910 subscribers only measure the youtube subscribers. It does not measure the additional youtube viewers, and it does not give any measurement of the podcast listeners (two separate venues for sending out our message).

Your Board faces many challenges to maintain our Society's vitality and ability to move forward. This is not a division problem of "it costs $6,000 ($500 per month for 12 months) and we need "x" amount of new members to justify that expense". Such reasoning is two-dimensional thinking. There are qualitative aspects to the Board's decision to enhance our marketing efforts. Every NCRS meeting I go to, I hear the same thing, "we need to increase membership!" Everyone feels that way. Few people step forward with well-reasoned ways to accomplish this mission. So simply saying, "we need to build membership" is not constructive in and of itself. We face two chronic issues: aging members and an underappreciation and understanding by the non-NCRS car-collector world regarding of what our awards are and what do they mean. Someone ones said it best, "we are the best kept secret in the car collecting world". That's a problem.

The NCRS board has heard the membership about the need to increase membership and increase the understanding and appreciation of our awards. Not only is our enhanced marketing intended to help increase awareness of the NCRS to the non-NCRS car collecting world, and thereby increase the perceived value of our awards, but also increase membership. By promoting the understanding of our prestigious awards to the non-NCRS car collecting world, it will increase the perceived value of our awards. Our awards can and often do increase value of our cars that achieve those awards.

I joined the NCRS in 1981. In the late 1970's, you could buy just about any nice C2 for about $3,500. Those days are over and they are never coming back. When you add the cost of these cars today, the cost of restoration, registration costs for NCRS events, travel, hotel bills, insurance, storage, the dollars are multiples of the "good old days". To suggest that "value" is not an important component to our efforts is just not in line with today's market.

I appreciate Mike Murray and Mike Doty. They are both friends on mine, but the other 7 members of your Board of Directors have chosen to move forward to achieve these important goals. You will see more efforts in the future to market and enhance our brand.

We are all in this together.

Best wishes to you.

Tony Stein
Region VII Director

[Michael J.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

I can see this as a marketing ploy to increase membership, but I do not think the # of members we have is our primary problem. According to the BOD minutes, we have over 10,950 members. But if you look at the attendance at many chapter and regional meets, especially those who bring cars, it is a tiny fraction of that. What is being done to increase participation and enthusiasm and get many more of those 10,950 people participating? I don't see a podcast or YouTube show doing that.

[Michael I.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Owen,
Our podcaster Steve Garrett is indeed a NCRS member.
Mike

[Michael I.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Michael,

NCRS's membership is more than twice that of most of the GM marque clubs, but the fact is that it has been declining 2-3% a year since about 2016. We do need to increase or at least stabilize our membership if NCRS is to be able to continue to offer our members all of the benefits they have come to rely on. As to attendance at our events, I agree that we probably never see more than about 10% of our membership over the course of a year at these events. The fact is that the bulk of our membership belong solely to receive our two magazines, the Restorer and the Driveline. They seem to be perfectly content with that level of "participation." It has been that way for as long as I have been a member and I suspect a lot longer than that. Regional Director Tony Stein is using Constant Contact to put out a monthly newsletter to all of the NCRS members in his Region, not just his Chapter members. I am encouraging the other Directors, including myself, to follow Tony's lead within their respective regions. It will be interesting to see if Tony's reaching out results in any more Chapter membership or participation in Chapter events in his Region.

Mike

[Michael J.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Thanks Mike, I guess that makes sense, people join for whatever attracts them. If it is the publications, I guess that is fine, but I still think it is disappointing more don't drive and enter their cars in our meets and participate in the events so we can get to know them. The ones that hide out and only red the publications and never attend meetings are not the ones I know at all.

[Tom R.]

Re: Board of Directors Meeting Elections and Appointments

Your Board of Directors voted 7-2 to approve a new and more dynamic approach to promoting and marketing the NCRS and the NCRS "brand". Your analytics are incomplete. The Corvette Today has both listeners and subscribers. The 3,910 subscribers only measure the youtube subscribers. It does not measure the additional youtube viewers, and it does not give any measurement of the podcast listeners (two separate venues for sending out our message).

Your Board faces many challenges to maintain our Society's vitality and ability to move forward. This is not a division problem of "it costs $6,000 ($500 per month for 12 months) and we need "x" amount of new members to justify that expense". Such reasoning is two-dimensional thinking. There are qualitative aspects to the Board's decision to enhance our marketing efforts. Every NCRS meeting I go to, I hear the same thing, "we need to increase membership!" Everyone feels that way. Few people step forward with well-reasoned ways to accomplish this mission. So simply saying, "we need to build membership" is not constructive in and of itself. We face two chronic issues: aging members and an underappreciation and understanding by the non-NCRS car-collector world regarding of what our awards are and what do they mean. Someone ones said it best, "we are the best kept secret in the car collecting world". That's a problem.

Just finished listening to Tony on the Corvette Today blogger with Steve Garrett. Got the link in the other forum post and wasn't sure where to post my take, but knowing the "fire power" has been posting here...felt it best to share my review here. I'll post some of it there, perhaps.

Overall, well done! Tony is an excellent spokesman for the organization...has a nice calming voice that presents clearly. Nice work! Steve is a great interviewer! You can tell he knows the subject and asks questions that draws the best from his interviewee by leading with a question that pulls a knowledgeable and informative response.

The downside, for me, is I'm a content consumer so I am sensitive to consumer content vs. click bate. The CorvetteBlogger is loaded with click bait. I dropped subscription to our local newspaper due to its web page and clickbait...I only needed a print version but the size shrunk rather dramatically. Clickbait are those pop-up ads, streaming video with the podcast surrounded by ads including a string of ads at the bottom of the screen that, evolves and that has tapped into one's internet search Cookies and pops-up with items previously searched on...i.e., Amazon, etc.

a content consumer attends for content...not the clickbait. Clickbait attempts to draw a listeners attention away the content. Hosts know that podcasts can be tedious and boring so provide alternative "flashy" ads to redirect our attention. In addition, if you tend to the podcast, you are then subject to several ads interjected in the podcast. In this particular podcast. I think I counted four ads that ran an approximate of twelve minutes out of the 32 minute podcast or 37 percent of the time was advertising.

TDB participants are content consumers. If you think about it, the NCRS website is quite static versus (or a comparative analysis) that of Corvette Today. That's the price of membership...we pay to cut distractions out! We like it and can tell from posters, we like it that way! TDB'ers subscribe to consume and comprehend the details of content posts, without the distractions seen on "modern day" web pages. Even the CF, manages their vendor ads that can can access content without being inundated by clickbait.

I'll end my review with a quote from Walter Lippmann, a twentieth century journalist and foremost foreign policy analysis of his period...from WWi to WWII. He wrote in his "Today and Tomorrow" column:

While television is supposed to be ‘free,’ it has in fact become the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandising.

He wrote this in 1949, when television was being introduced into households throughout the U.S....Tony may remember these days! LOL. But Lippmann wrote this because he was annoyed that TV was used as a vessel for TV-quiz shows and the scandals surrounding TV advertising. This is precisely what America is experiencing today with social media and its dependence on the medium of clickbait advertising for its survival.

I share this in hopes it provides perspective to our national leadership as it looks for forays into this marketing medium in an effort to increase membership and create awareness among the larger Corvette community to the NCRS role to restore, preserve and educate on America's Sports Car.

As a PS: Netflix is floating this alternative to its membership no ad subscription now that is has risen to $13.08 a month. It offers an "ad" version at nearly half the cost. Now, why would I do that when I subscribed for what $5 bucks to avoid nauseous advertisements?