SDC Zone Talk....where are the Zone Directors?

[Stu Chapman]

When SDC President Carl Thomason set up the SDC Zone Talk Forum site, I believe his intention was to encourage input between the members and their Zone Directors, Zone Coordinators and Regional Managers. Only Zone Directors Cliff Tattersall from Crossroads, Frank Van Doorn from North Central and Gary Ash from Northeast have bothered to jump on board and let their respective members know they are there for them. Where are the other seven Zone Directors? The Forum is the communications tool of the future for SDC when topical discussions are important. Are you listening?
Stu Chapman

[showbizkid]

I agree with Stu. We are a far-flung club. Communication is essential!

[2moredoors]

I always listen to you Stu. You have interesting things to say. Hope you warm down there it was a cold drive home from York.

[JimC]

Indeed! When you think about it, a forum is an astonishing tool. We have at our fingertips, a place where we can poll the minds of the who's who of our hobby. We have everything here, from former Studebaker employees, to magazine columnists, to lifelong Stude aficionados. A forum allows the club to communicate with large groups of people immediately, without a month (or more) lag through the magazine and without lots of manual hunting and days of hopeless searching for help. I am sensitive to the fact that times are changing and not everyone appreciates this whole Internet thing, but like it or not, it's not going anywhere, and people who avoid it at all costs aren't just hurting themselves but the hobby as a whole. I know many people who would never feel comfortable looking a stranger's number up in the roster (even a coordinator/director) and calling them, but wouldn't hesitate to post on a forum like this. Without communicating here we miss out on those people, which is doubly sad because those people are the future of the club.

On the flip side, I will point out that winter is the off-season for our hobby, and perhaps some of them are still hibernating. Fortunately, spring is bearing down upon us, and I imagine that they'll be out soon.

[53k]

When SDC President Carl Thomason set up the SDC Zone Talk Forum site, I believe his intention was to encourage input between the members and their Zone Directors, Zone Coordinators and Regional Managers. Only Zone Directors Cliff Tattersall from Crossroads, Frank Van Doorn from North Central and Gary Ash from Northeast have bothered to jump on board and let their respective members know they are there for them. Where are the other seven Zone Directors? The Forum is the communications tool of the future for SDC when topical discussions are important. Are you listening?
Stu Chapman

I can't speak for the Zone Director, but I (Atlantic Zone Coordinator) have posted twice re the Atlantic Zone Forum, once on the General Forum and once on the Atlantic Zone Forum.

http://forum.studebakerdriversclub.com/showthread.php?69170-New-SDC-Zone-Talk-Forum

http://forum.studebakerdriversclub.c...Manager-needed!!!

[Stu Chapman]

I can't speak for the Zone Director, but I (Atlantic Zone Coordinator) have posted twice re the Atlantic Zone Forum, once on the General Forum and once on the Atlantic Zone Forum.

http://forum.studebakerdriversclub.com/showthread.php?69170-New-SDC-Zone-Talk-Forum

http://forum.studebakerdriversclub.c...Manager-needed!!!

I have read your input. But it's the National Zone Directors who have not responded I have concern with. They are the ones who need to participate in a line of communication with their members.
Stu Chapman

[raoul5788]

Are they even aware of the new section?

[2moredoors]

They/we should all be aware we received notification from Carl Thomason.

cliff t
Rgl Dir Crossroads

[jimmijim8]

Yeah that's it. "The flip side" NOT " You do speak the truth of what the matter be"

Just got back from York and didn't appear to be out of season for Stude folks.

Indeed! When you think about it, a forum is an astonishing tool. We have at our fingertips, a place where we can poll the minds of the who's who of our hobby. We have everything here, from former Studebaker employees, to magazine columnists, to lifelong Stude aficionados. A forum allows the club to communicate with large groups of people immediately, without a month (or more) lag through the magazine and without lots of manual hunting and days of hopeless searching for help.{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{{ I am sensitive to the fact that times are changing and not everyone appreciates this whole Internet thing, but like it or not, it's not going anywhere, and people who avoid it at all costs aren't just hurting themselves but the hobby as a whole.}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}} I know many people who would never feel comfortable looking a stranger's number up in the roster (even a coordinator/director) and calling them, but wouldn't hesitate to post on a forum like this. Without communicating here we miss out on those people, which is doubly sad because those people are the future of the club.

On the flip side, I will point out that winter is the off-season for our hobby, and perhaps some of them are still hibernating. Fortunately, spring is bearing down upon us, and I imagine that they'll be out soon.

[Colgate Studebaker]

Can someone in the hierarchy make another "suggestion" to the directors that they need to communicate better with the general membership? I feel this is leading to the issue that arose at last years International meet, again. If the directors only communicate via their own channels, we have the same response facing us at the next "get together" of the minds that control this club. I have recently moved from Wisconsin to Florida, and have held off trying to contact my directors, but a few months from now I will have the time to pursue discussions with my new director. We the membership need to keep the pressure on this issue to move the club forward.Bill Van Alstyne

[Stu Chapman]

Can someone in the hierarchy make another "suggestion" to the directors that they need to communicate better with the general membership? I feel this is leading to the issue that arose at last years International meet, again. If the directors only communicate via their own channels, we have the same response facing us at the next "get together" of the minds that control this club. I have recently moved from Wisconsin to Florida, and have held off trying to contact my directors, but a few months from now I will have the time to pursue discussions with my new director. We the membership need to keep the pressure on this issue to move the club forward.Bill Van Alstyne

Bill...you are bang on with your comments. It's the nonsense that arose at South Bend this past summer that has created the necessity for our National Directors to keep in regular touch with the membership. Three have come on board. Seven have not. Maybe they should remember that elections have consequences.
Stu Chapman

[Skip Lackie]

There are many ways a board member can/should use to stay in touch with his/her constituents, and checking in on the Forum is certainly one of them. But there are many other ways, perhaps the most useful being attendance at local and zone meets and talking face-to-face with the membership. Something fewer than 25% of our members use the Forum, so this venue clearly misses the majority of the membership. While I would prefer that all board members use every possible mechanism (including the Forum) to monitor the opinions of their members, I would not like to think that a Forum presence would somehow become some sort of Litmus test for board membership.

Those of us who post here are still a minority. We may be more active (and probably more opinionated), but we are not more important.

[JimC]

Skip-

What you say about numbers is correct. Not everyone in the club is here. I also agree that the directors need to monitor all channels of communication, which means hitting the zone meets, face to face interactions, and maybe even submitting letters to individual chapter newsletters from time to time.

That being said, the 25% who are here (I'm not totally sure how to definitively say who are and aren't active here, and who are and aren't members out of those who are here, but I like your number, so let's go with it!) are a significant number. 10-ish years ago, 0% were here. So if you want to take those two data points and make a lot of assumptions, this site will house the majority of our members in the next decade or so. I will say one thing that is certain, the growth rate on this site is currently outpacing the growth rate of the club (at least if you take the numbers of new members here per day and compare them to the new member welcomes in Turning Wheels). Factor in the people leaving the club for various reasons (failure to renew, death, etc), and the forum is outpacing the club proper by leaps and bounds.

Also, take into consideration what I said earlier, about preferred sources of communication. I know my zone director well enough that I could call him on the phone if I had a question. But the primary reason for that is because 1) He's in my chapter, and 2) I met him here first. But If I found myself in another part of the country, and I didn't know my zone coordinator from Adam, there's just about no way on earth I'd pick up the phone to introduce myself. I'm just not that type of person. This forum would be where I would try to get help. The funny thing is that compared to the current generation, I'm almost old fashioned. There are people 5 -10 years younger than I am who wouldn't know what to do with themselves if they couldn't find help online. If our club wants to reach those people, we desperately need to be online.

This forum, in some ways, is like a booth at an expo. We're open to the public, but we're also serving our members. When I was running a business and going around to expos promoting my work, I made darn sure I was there at the booth. It was my business, and if I let that booth sit alone, then I would lose sales. Sure, people were paying for a service, but they were also buying me. In the same sense, even if the majority aren't here, the Internet truly is the "final frontier" of communication these days. The Internet is how people exist in 2013. We bank online, join clubs online, heck we even order our pizzas online. So if our club has any hope of being relevant (or even just being!) 20 years from now, we need to be at least on par with the times, if not a step ahead. When our zone directors, the people "at the top" of our club cannot even follow instructions to come here and let us know they're listening, it's like the business manager leaving the expo booth empty. Without a knowledgeable smiling face there in the booth to greet them, the people with the money will just walk on by.

Let me wrap up. I agree, a zone director that was ONLY here on the forums would be missing a huge chunk of his job. But I feel a zone director who refuses to participate here is doing the same, just in another area. Pretending the Internet isn't a valid, important method of communication and ignoring it is sticking your head in the sand. It's denial of reality. It doesn't get you anywhere, and it's letting down a whole lot of people who you could be building bridges with and ensuring this club doesn't die in a decade and a half when the actuarial charts show that the majority of today's membership will be gone.

So yes, I feel it's appropriate to ask our directors to step up and participate. And for the record (since nothing on the Internet is ever erased) I would like to say that a few decades from now if I find myself a director, I hope someone will rub it in my face if I'm not keeping up with the times too. Maybe I won't like the idea of the cybernetic implants or whatever people use to communicate with in 2045, but if that's where the people are I hope someone will respect me enough to point that out to me.

Saying all that, we do have a good group of directors (or so I assume. I mean, we voted for them!), so I'd still like to live in my own fantasy for a while and just hope that they haven't shown up because they're still in "winter mode" and not due to any sort of negative impressions they have of the forum. This is a great tool, and I hope that they all see that. Come join us, directors! We need you!

[JimC]

Also, I'm sensitive to the fact that some people might be all for the Forum, but for whatever reason can't join (e.g. they don't know how to, their Internet connection is too slow or unstable to reliably connect, etc...). However, even there, I would encourage those people to find a young adult or some Internet-savvy person to help them, or to somehow post by proxy for them. I assure you, the rumors aren't true - most young folks don't bite!

[Skip Lackie]

Jim-
No real disagreement with your post, but I worry that the opinions of those on the Forum might, a priori, be given more weight than those from members who are more interested in restoring their cars than they are in surfing the Net. We are dealing here with a medium of information exchange that is both instantaneous and (because it's text, not verbal) documentable and semi-permanent. I noticed that the Forum discussion last fall about last summer's board meeting was carried forward by about a dozen quite vocal members. Not saying that's a bad thing, but 12 (or 50) members is hardly a quorum of the total membership -- or even a quorum of one Zone's membership.

That said, the board of directors has apparently been informed by Carl Thomason about the existence of the new Zone info board on the Forum -- so I agree that it is incumbent on each of them to check in on their Zone's page periodically.