Growing our Club

Recently, spending more time on Youtube than I care to admit to, I came across an interesting British video that examined the decline in Classic Motorcycle Clubs and the sale of classic British motorcycles.  The crux of the matter was that those folk interested in classic Brit machines and the activities of the Clubs were/are aging out and that if clubs failed to look towards renewal they would fade from the scene.

Of course this is Australia, there are many differences with regard to the length of the riding season, (in our case year round), bikes on offer and the activities offered by clubs, but clearly there are many commonalities.

Our Club has actually discussed these pressures and made a decision that we need to make changes so that we do not become another statistic in the list of faded or lost clubs.  To that end there are many things we are actively doing and I’d like to take this opportunity to share that plan with you.

Some members of our Club on a ride

Most club members have more than one bike, many have traditional classics along with more modern daily rider machines, some have small capacity commuter bikes, some ADVs, some have tourers and quite a few have a stable of many machines across a wide variety of categories. The key point is that members motorcycling interests span a broad cross-section of the motorcycling possibilities and that’s the way it should be.  However many “would be” members think that we are only into “older “ say pre 1970’s machinery, so clearly our first task is to better promote the idea that we embrace all types of bikes and that members will find like-minded friends amongst our club membership.

The next aspect we need to address is to get members who have bikes listed with the club for Historic registration purposes but do not attend any of our rides or social events, to that end we have expanded the list of activities and types of rides on offer and hopefully with some gentle persuasion we can activate those latent members to join the fun.  Some of the issues non-participant members have raised are rides being too long or fast for the older machines they ride, a desire for more social functions, not finding monthly meetings interesting enough and so forth.

We’ve taken all that on board and are changing the style, scope and social interaction of meetings, added extra specific rides and events and of course have actively sought to bring those inactive members back into the active world of the club.  

Some of the changes for meetings include, restoration reports, demonstrations, guest speakers, pre-meeting meals, sharing of techniques and more.

Probably of key importance is the need to attract younger members, our club like many is predominantly made of members who fall into the post 55yr old or retirement category and many started out as much younger folk, we are simply getting older. Of course there are also members who no longer ride due to health, age, injury or immobility, yet still have bikes they want to show at events.  We are not in any way seeking to discard members, we just know that we need to add to our membership and ideally we need to appeal to younger folk looking for a motorcycling home.

Again to give ourselves curb appeal we must present a modern face, hence the change to the new website and embracing of Facebook and Instagram, but we also need events that have broad appeal, which for example is why we are conducting the Goulburn “Distinguished Gentleman’s Ride” on 17 May this year.

The message for clubs like ours is clear, adapt, change as needed and embrace the future or we will be left in the past.  And we have no intention of being left in the past.