Monthly Meeting Minutes
Third Monday, February 20, 2012

Attendance: 41 members

The monthly meeting was called to order at 8:02 pm by President, David Perez. New member, Gary Morel of Elmhurst, was recognized. Gary owns a russet brown 1980 MGB.

Upcoming Events: - See details in the Driveline or on the Website of the many events available for club members in the near future.
02/26/11 – Swap Meet – The 16th Annual Swap Meet will be open to all European sports cars and motorcycles. This is a major fundraiser for the club to subsidize the club’s yearly activities. Club members are urged to assist and to participate in this event. Jim Evans noted vendor participation entries were on par with the last few years (although not as great as last years’ high of 119 vendors).

Annual Business Meeting
(Brief synopses of the meeting high points follow in the below meeting minutes. A packet of submitted documents can be made available upon request to
Secretary@chicagolandMGclub.com)
2011 Summary – Bill Reece
Scorecard for goals itemized last year:
Achieved:
- Club finance improvements addressed; outside auditor engaged
- Added Garage Tours to yearly program
- Continued to upgrade of Driving Events with dash plaques and trophies
- Re-institute monthly email blasts to membership

Progress made on the following:
- Improvement in monthly meeting programs
- More emphasis on Technical presentations

  2012 Initiatives
- Continued improvement to monthly meeting programs
- Expand on Driving program changes
- Expand the Swap Meet visitor base by utilizing ‘social networking’ modalities

Membership report – Victor L’Heureux
Membership has been stable for the past four years with 25 new members joining the CMGC in 2011. Prior to the 2012 Membership Renewal campaign the club had a membership of 298 members; our current renewals to-date for 2012 total 216 members. This is in line with previous year’s renewal progress.

  Regalia report – George Phariss

The Club did not spend money to purchase any new regalia and continued to sell off old inventory. Our current focus is to utilize the online website Fieldhouse for a majority of regalia clothing items.

2012 Initiatives
Continue to monitor on line store sales to determine what club members would want and make these items available to sell at meetings and events.

2011 Accomplishments
- Drafted letter to be included in New Member Welcome Packet that explains how to go to our Club online store at Fieldhouse.com/MG and purchase personal regalia. Name tag order form also included in the packet.
- Continued to sell off old inventory and added some new inventory to sell at Club meetings and events.
- Look into other means of making name tags as well as coming up with a semi-temporary name tag that we give to each new member when they join the club.

Library report – Wilbur Mennell
2011 Summary
For calendar year 2011, we stayed (slightly) under budget, spending $186.21. We added nine books. I am again soliciting suggestions for new materials from the members for the current year.
As I have done for the past year, I will not be bringing the entire library to each meeting. If you would like to check something out, please let me know via E-mail a day or two in advance and I'll bring it to the meeting or other event.
New additions 2011
Books:

My Greatest Race	Anglo-American Cars/td>
MG Record Breakers	Mickey Thompson
How to Weld	They Started in MGs
101 Brookstone Cartoons	Tuning the A-Series Engine
Bob Lutz, Car Guys vs Bean Counters

Website report – Barney Gaylord
We have more good news from the club web site in 2011. After a two year slump of about 2/3 drop in traffic in 2008 and 2009 (along with the bad economy), web site traffic was up 40% in 2010 and another 35% in 2011. For the last half of 2011 the club web site was hosting nearly 1000 visitors daily and serving up 140,000 page views per month (about 5 page views per visit). This is very close to the highest usage levels in 2007. If it improves just a little more in 2012 it may get back to setting some new records.

For an annual perspective, the web sites on our club server have attracted 1.1 million visits (30% increase) and served up 4.3 million page views (22% increase) in 2011. Indeed MG is alive and well in Chicago.

Barney Gaylord's web site www.MGAguru.com is mostly about technical information, with different attractions and different traffic patterns. This site added over 300 web pages

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