Dear Members of the CCA and the
Corrado Community:
For nearly one year now the CCA has been struggling to keep up with shipments of membership kits. This is, in part, due to the continued illness of our former President and membership kit shipper, Mike Erickson. Mike has done his best but his priorities
rightly lie elsewhere. We continue to wish the best for Mike and his family. It is worth noting that none of the CCA executives are employees of the club. We all work at regular jobs and volunteer significant amounts of our personal time to make the all-volunteer club the best it can be. As such, we feel some changes are in order and we plan a sweeping reorganization of the club.
But first, we should give you some history. The club was founded in 1995 with Brian White as President. I assumed the role of President in 1996 and incorporated the club in early 1997. I served as President, Chairman and Treasurer through 1998. In that year, Mike Erickson assumed the role of President and I remained Chairman and Treasurer. In 1999, Mike experienced some health problems which forced him to resign. Our second in command, John Kuitwaard, was unable to assume the role of President due to the increasing demands of his job. As a result, I again assumed the role of President, while also remaining Chairman and Treasurer. Following Mike’s resignation in 1999, we lost several other key CCA executives due to changing jobs, job relocations and general life changes. Mike continued to serve the club by shipping membership kits and CCA merchandise.
As I said, I assumed the role of President at that time and have, with the assistance of several other key CCA executives, managed the operations of the club as best as possible. I assumed the role for a short period of time and over the winter we sought volunteers for an election of new officers. Unfortunately, not a single person applied for any of the key leadership positions needed to move the club forward.
As a result of this, the remaining CCA executives have taken stock of why we are where we are, what the club does well and does poorly and where we should go in the future. We considered everything from dissolving the club to keeping everything the same.
Some of the things we discussed
and concluded were:
- The club’s members are all very busy people, hard at
work in our economy or in their studies. This allows for little time to donate to a club to run it and manage it. We do not anticipate that this situation will change.
- The club has done a good job of maintaining a web site
with deep resources and a vibrant email list. Most members find the web site and email list to be the greatest membership benefit available. Many members would like to assist to grow this resource.Doing so allows participation is small ways by many people, which can create a great deal of content.
- The club has done poorly at sending out regular printed
newsletters. These newsletters are
expensive to produce and take weeks of concerted effort to produce, edit and
organize the content. When the club was
started in 1995, most people were not online.
Now, in 2000, most Corrado owners and members of the general population
are online, making an online newsletter a feasible alternative to a printed
newsletter.
- The club has done poorly with shipping out membership
kits, which primarily consist of a club shirt.
When we sought volunteers to create a new shirt design, and later
offered a contest, no new designs were submitted.Mike was in charge of shipping these but, due to his inability to
work for long periods of time and attention to his personal health, a backlog
of kit mailings has been created. These
kits are becoming increasingly expensive to create, print and mail, which puts
pressure on the current cost of dues.
So, where do we go from here we
asked ourselves several months ago? We
decided that the only way for the club to continue as a viable, valuable
organization was to make some dramatic changes.
We have decided to focus entirely
on what we do best. We were an early
leader in bring car clubs online and we want to launch into this area more
strongly. We plan to make the following
changes over the next two months:
- Effective immediately, it will be FREE to join the club. The club currently has enough money to fund
operations for approximately 2 – 3 years.
The club will pay for continuing operations and selected special events
through tuner sponsorships, banner advertisement revenues, merchandise revenues
and membership donations.
- Effective immediately, the members section of the website is
no longer password-protected. This
great resource is now freely available to all Corrado enthusiasts the world
over.
- The process by which we create and ship merchandise items sold
by the club will be reviewed and changed to ensure that goods ship out
immediately upon the receipt of a web-based order.
- All outstanding membership kits will be shipped within 60
days. Mike has shipped me all of the
materials needed and we will be convening several volunteer kit shipping
sessions in Philadelphia to get these out the door. After all kits have shipped, membership kits will be discontinued
as a part of joining the club since the club will be free. If you have already paid, your $15 or $25
membership fee will not be refunded.
This money will be used to fund club operations for the next few years.
- Several key tuners who support the club, like AWE Tuning, Bahn
Brenner Motorsport, Crossroads VW, Madd Racing and New Dimensions currently
offer CCA discounts. We will endeavor
to maintain these programs if we can. As
part of an updated membership (not yet in place), we will be collecting more
detailed information about your cars as well as general demographic and
electronic contact information. This
information, at the option of each individual member, will be shared with these
tuners so that they can tailor specific product offerings and marketing
programs to our members. In addition,
the club will undertake efforts to ensure that tuners do not release this
information to other parties. Further,
we will begin the application process to join information privacy certification
programs such as TRUSTe.
- Printed newsletters will be discontinued. We will work to plan a web or email
newsletter with content created by individual members and submitted to the CCA
web site.
- We will work to redesign the CCA website and add several new
features such as automated newsletter submission, an archive of past
newsletters online, a fully-searchable web site, improved Corrado-L signup
forms, improved access to the Corrado-L search engine, direct access to update
and change your membership profile information, automated submission of Corrado
of the Month cars, automated voting for the Corrado of the Month and Corrado of
the Year and automated image gallery submission.
We look forward to any public
feedback and comment you wish to give on the Corrado-L mailing list. We thank you in advance for your patience
and your continued support!
Spoilers Up,
Jason D. Livingood
Chairman & President,
Corrado Club of America
