It's great to see all the input so far and read about how people would like to see the club grow. It would be great to keep this thread along the brainstorm that has been so far, encouraging everyone to have their say - there's no wrong or right so don't feel like you'll get bitten for making a suggestion.
Personally i like reading the forum to learn about others antics and stories and seeing their cars / projects etc. I don't mind if pics aren't perfect at all, anything that captures the Camaro image, whatever gen, whatever it's doing. Even updates and different angles if the cars just stood there every now and then just to let others know it's still collecting rust and dust
(i'm guilty of not doing this on my own project thread!!). Seeing as my Camaro is nearly 3 years in my posession and still not driveable
, it has hindered me getting as involved as i'd like to be in the physical activities out there.
There are other forums out there for Camaro's and Chevy's and i know the U.S ones have a much higher turnover in terms of posts and replies. I've known a couple of people on here have said that it can be a lot quicker to post and get a reply on the U.S ones, unfortunately that means that those users will slowly migrate to those sites and the situation over here worsens because there's less posting going on. It would be great to encourage eachother to keep the posts and information flowing, therefore attracting some further interest as to what we can offer as a club.
One of the things to tackle is to make sure we have enough server space to accommodate for plenty of pics etc. Hopefully with some fundraising this will be possible. I'm looking into ways that we can help cover the club costs (mainly just the server costs). I wouldn't want to see people pay to use the site - i actually wanted a Mustang back in the day and what put me off joining the owners club (to learn more about Mustangs) was paying £25 a year to access a website, being only 16 at the time it was a lot of cash to handover.
I'm looking at ways that we can provide club merchandise - t-shirts, hoodies, stickers, that type of thing - that we will make just enough cash on to help support the running of the site. That way we get to enjoy some Camaro goodies as well
. The risk of paid membership is that people could expect a certain level of service to be delivered and we could also be turning away users. I have also thought about setting up a small donation paypal account or something similar, for those who would like to chip in a few £ every now and then, rather than spending say more cash on merchandise one might not want, but would still like to show some support. This is maybe something we can also do when we decide on certain meets to attend etc, we can have a mini collection to maybe pay a few £ to park a members Camaro in the club spot, if we have such a thing setup.
There is some more advertising resource to be tapped, i'm looking into something at the moment to see if we can get any headway with it. Not a fan of the heavy advertising that some forums use, which is to plug adverts into the middle of a topic, so ideally one or two main advertises would be better to help chip into it. After all, we're not looking to make money from the site, just to allow the UK to have it's own Camaro resource available.
Thanks to everyone's contributions so far - not just to this topic, but to the site as a whole. It's everyone's interest and engagement that keeps the site and the club going and worthwhile having. Please do add more info about what you would like to get from the club, it all helps!!
I'm also waiting on some new software to arrive to help work on the merchandising stuff as well, so more on that to come!
Cheers,
Ray
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