Monthly Meeting Minutes February 16, 2015

36 Members in attendance

CMGC president Dave Novak opened the meeting at 8:00 pm.

Annual Business Meeting

2014 Summary - George Phariss / 2015 Initiatives - David Novak
2014 turned out to be a challenging year. Membership dipped again slightly from previous years, operating expenses outgrew income, ancillary club positions are still left unfilled. On a positive note, a higher percentage of club members participated in various club driving events, new sources of advertising revenue were found and a greater interaction between the two Chicago clubs – Vintage MG Car Club and Chicagoland MG Club. The Chicagoland MG Club was this years’ recipient of the Nuffield Award by the North American Council of MG Registers – a committee of the MG Car Club-UK.

2015 Initiatives

Continue the number of tech sessions and communication of them. Continue improvement to monthly meeting programs. Continue to build on our club's interface with the Vintage club. Evaluate the Swap Meet and explore ways to improve outcomes. Improve income by selling more Driveline ads. Begin rolling out an electronic version of the Driveline.

2014 Membership Report – David Novak
Membership has been dropping in the last few years, and now we’ve had 2 years of sub-300 members. We ended this year with 268 members. The challenge for 2015, will be to increase the membership, however I believe that between the BCU show, the Swap meet, and reaching out again to past members, we will be able to increase our member base.

2014 Regalia Report – George Phariss
We continued to monitor sales and evaluate products that are available at our online store at fieldhouse.com/mg. Online regalia article was placed in each issue of the Driveline and sold existing inventory while adding new inventory of hats, badges, license plate frames, and new hats.

2015 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.

2014 Library Report – Wilbur Mennell

For calendar year 2014 we stated under budget, spending $94.02. We added six books, one CD, one DVD, and one VHS tape.

2014 Website Report – Barney Gaylord
For 2013 web site traffic is slightly up from the year before. On average we have been getting 700 web visitors per day and have served up 1.5 million page views for the year, about 6 page views per visit. They still like Tech Tips, Classifieds, and Photos of past events, in that order. Popular tech subjects were MGB wiring, heater and overdrive. Peak viewing for the year was in the last 10 days of October sometimes running over 12,000 page views per day. Web crawlers and spiders continue to do us justice with indexing our web pages.

Barney Gaylord's web site www.MGAguru.com is mostly about technical information, with different attractions and different traffic patterns. Traffic continues to rise, now consistently over 2,500 visitors per day for most of the year. The site served up 3.4 million page views in 2014, about 4 pages for each visit.

Seth Jones' web site www.SpridgetGuru.com is now going on six years in service. Visitor traffic there has jumped 50% in the past year, now serving more than 300 visitors per day, 320,000 page views for the year. Most popular downloads there are workshop manuals, driver handbooks, service parts lists. Popular tech topics are engine rebuild, radio, fuel pump, carburetor, spark plugs. Various derivatives of Google search engines and translators have touched this web site more than 3500 times in December. This is increasing regularly with increasing web site traffic. Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.

2014 Driving Events Report – Reinout Vogt
Reinout thanked the eighteen organizers, rally masters, and tour leaders that provided 2014 Driving Events.

The 2014 Driving Events program, the second year that he Vintage MG Car Club of Chicago and the Chicagoland MG Club shared the Driving Events, the combined calendar offered a variety of driving events and participation continued to increase.

The 22 Driving Events (one less than in 2013) included 6 rallies (two more than 2103), 7 tours (one more than 2013), one auto cross (four less than 2013) and eight other events (same as 2013). Unfortunately the Lucas Memorial Night Rally was cancelled due to illness of the rally master. Because there was no auto cross coordinator in 2014, there were no joined events with the Windy City Miata club.


2015 Plans

Continue to combine Driving Events of the Vintage MG Car Club of Chicago and the Chicagoland MG Club and further encourage inter-club participation. Transition to new organizers of the Secrets of Jo Daviess County and the Wine Cheese and Beer Tours. This will also require recruiting new rally masters for the Land’s

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