Hi Mike,
As always you make good pragmatic points.

You are spot on re: non-renewing members being the best option. They were motivated to join the club in the first place, so have either become deceased, forgotten to renew or decided not to. In the latter case as you say it's important that we understand why. In Mars (where I worked all my career - probably better known as M&Ms in the US), we used to talk about the 3 Rs (No not Reading Riting and Rithmetic !), Recruit, Reward, Retain.
So I believe we should have different programmes to address these areas.
Recruit - look for new opportunities to enrol new members, The post after yours, which I will reply to shortly, has a good idea which we have also discussed at board meetings, to try to gat an ACMOC presence at many shows rather than focussing on just one ("The ACMOC National Show"). 
Reward - build more member benefits into our "offering" such as the Technical Library, free access to all back issues of the magazine, large range of reproduction parts etc. etc.
Retain - We will shortly implement automatic renewal which should go a long way to addressing the problem of members forgetting to renew, As you say, we should also be following up all non-renewing members.

I also strongly believe we should gather information about our members. This would have been quite expensive in the past but is cheap and easy to do by email. But not all members are on email I hear you cry. Well, with any questionnaire you will never get a 100% return, especially if the respondent has to fork out for a stamp and envelope to return the completed questionnaire. The other point is that normally in market research you only get a sample of your audience to reply anyway, but any information is better than no information.
We may be able to use text messages to engage members who don't regularly access the website. It would be great to know for each member what their preferred method of communication is.

You are also absolutely spot on in your last paragraph.

As you can see, we are not short of ideas, but as always it is resources to do them that limits our ability. It would be really great to have small groups tackling some of these areas, especially if those involved are passionate about their ideas (hint hint !).

Anyway, I must move on.....

Thank you for your contribution, it's much appreciated !
 

Hello David (DRD4112),
Thank you for taking the time to contribute to this thread.
I find it quite surprising that enthusiasts in Gridley and Rantoul Illinois have not heard of the club, after all you are probably around only 1-200 miles from Peoria, our "Spiritual Home" and where our ACMOC office is located. 
Your 2 cents worth (typing on a UK keyboard I don't have the cents symbol, suppose I could have done $0.02 )) is very valuable. 
As I mentioned in an earlier note, many of us feel quite strongly that  we must seek new opportunities to find and recruit into the club fellow enthusiasts. Having a stand at more shows across all our geographies, rather than just thinking (and focussing) on one show I think is the way forward. We just need "volunteers" to fly the flag (probably literally as well as metaphorically) and become "ACMOC Ambassadors" (hint hint).  We should be able to develop a "Kit" with leaflets, merchandise, banners etc. that could be easily and cheaply transported to our Ambassadors for use at local shows.

We do have a (currently underused) calendar function that appears under "EVENTS" in the main headings. This could be used to inform all members about upcoming events. We also have the "Website Links" part of the forum where I started some threads to list out places of interest in my own part of the world (UK and the Netherlands) which are likely to be of interest to members visiting the area. This could be a great resource, especially if we cast it as an interactive map like the map of members locations on the Chapters page.

As I mentioned in my reply to Mike, we have lots of really great ideas, but could do with more volunteers to take control and deliver on them..


 

blwatson wrote:

One thing that I had suggested in the past is getting the club magazine into the local Cat dealership sales/parts lobby. I took some of my old magazines into my local dealer and they had never heard of the club or knew that it existed. They were impressed with the magazine and let me leave them in the waiting area for people to read. This gets exposer to a group of people who may be most likely to spread the word or join. Just a thought.Bruce 
Hi Bruce,
Thank you for your contribution. Again, it's an excellent idea and it would be quite easy to do a "Pilot" with one or two co-operative dealerships to see if it was cost effective.Magazines do cost us money to produce although we often have old copies which are surplus to requirements and could probably be used in this way. We certainly have the new "Primer" leaflet (see below) which could also be used.  

 

juiceman wrote:

Fat Dan: Another idea/thought that "I wished I had thought of that first". Here we go again! That idea was passed up the food chain, and the response was dead silence.
I wanted to (suggested) a raffle at a national show, people could either buy a ticket/tickets or if you bought a membership, you would be entered into the drawing, some device to where you would be drawn into the club, and reeled in sort of speak. 
Give the donor a receipt for fair value (tax purposes ya know)(an incentive to "donate") or if it is an all cash raffle, the seller could get some $ back out of a hunk of iron they do not wish to own. 
We used to do all types of fun games/raffles at waterfowl dinner functions, and it added quite a bit of $$$ by the end of the evening. The best part was, everyone had a really enjoyable time participating in such.  I also realize there are some folks that view a raffle as a form of gambling, which is against their beliefs...
The donor can drop tractor off at a "show" and its up to the winner to get it home; If that cannot be arranged, they can always donate it back and raffle it off again?
I like your idea Dan, lets see if anyone is paying attention at the wheel. JM

 

Hi JM,
Hmmm, probably better to ask if anyone is playing attention at the steering clutch levers )
As I have mentioned, we are not short of ideas, indeed we have an absolute wealth of talent amongst our members, we just need enthusiastic members to make things happen.
We are all volunteers and as such have limited time we can devote to running the club, so when resource is limited we have to prioritise activities which is never easy.
Would you like me to ask Mary (although I'm sure you could do this yourself) to send you out another box of old magazines / Primers ?