We have regretfully made the decision to CANCEL the July meeting. For members benefit the reasons for this included the sudden loss of venue, the extremely low signups, and as an extension of that a courtesy afforded to Mr Camp. Simply speaking it did not appear to be wise or respectful to ask the gentleman to travel cross country, sacrifice his weekend and time from his own family, to speak for a short period at a reset venue to a dozen and a half reefers. There may be an opportunity to bring him back in the fall. Before signing on to that we will need an idea of interest in the topic area. As it stands we dont have a great idea if people were disinterested in the venue, the bbq, the speaker and topic, etc. I have my own thoughts that summer simply presents too many conflicts.
Our apologies to those that were looking forward to this late cancel. We did entertain the idea of scrambling to invite other clubs, but I had concerns that this may position the club into some sort of second class status.
So we will regather our thoughts about where to go from here. We need input AND active participation of membership. That includes the "core" that we usually see at meetings and those who are new or on the cursory side of things. I plan to start another thread about what members want to see for future meetings, speakers, store/club days, fragging events, DIY events etc. We need to know if the raffles are driving factors for meeting attendance, and if they are, should they be. Its a valid question.
Some have also asked about the conference. We had decided in january to place our energies elsewhere this year. Part of this was due to issues around uncontrollable events like the weather. We now have some competing issues with other regional events in ny and ri, and coupled with vendor concerns about it being worth their while to show up. While it may seem great to get things on the cheap late in shows because of things like weather and attendance, that does not help to get people back the following year, economically speaking.
One thing that would help in that regard if we choose to pursue something next year would be our ability to tell folks about our average meeting attendance. We cant expect much if we say we brought in a speaker from Dallas to talk with a few members of the BOD and a few handfuls of others.
