I am concerned about letting Audi (either Audi UK or Audi Ingolstadt) have any addresses of the members of my Club. Not that I don't trust Audi, it's just that there are issues such as the Data Protection Act and there are members who would object vigorously if their address was divulged. Also I would not want other Clubs or service providers to have access to the database of members that I have personally built up with so much effort.
The Card is issued by ACI HQ. They will allocate a Club reference number to each Club... ACI HQ would be told by each club, how many members they had and what prospects they have for growth....So for example, my Auto Union Register has 30 active members and 170 in a forum (contactable but dont want to be part of my club). ACI HQ would issue me with 100 cards, lets say and I send the cards to each member on my own database....and have sufficient cards in stock to service my expanding membership.
Thus, no addresses are divulged. All is kept confidential. Your club retains full control over your own membership. ACI are not interested in going direct to your members, as they prefer to have the local organisers do this work...also they do respect what you have built up with your own efforts.
What happens if I am a member of two clubs?
You would get two cards as each club operates independently and has its own stock of ACI Club Cards....this overlap adds a bit to the running costs of printing cards but it is best to leave this duplication in place, than to add further complexity to the system.
The benefits would be the same...it does not mean you get double the benefits, it means you can show an ACI card to some service provider and receive some benefits for it.
As a club organiser, I already have a membership card which entitles the holder to certain advantages. Why should I allow my members to have a card which competes for their wallet?
All clubs need to create additional services to gain revenues, to subsidise their activities. That is accepted and the ACI card would not interfere with that.
The Club Card is designed primarily to be a Membership card, so it would for instance be used as an ID when attending events and allows the user of the card entry to that event.
The use of the card as an "Entitlement Card" is still being developed. There will be services and products offered which are specific to the ACI or they offer services and products which are available at present through the museum shop at Audi Tradition in Ingolstadt (where products at present are ony sold over the counter and only posted within Germany).
The idea is that these services will be complementary to the individual clubs' own services and products. Inevitably there will be products such as videos, books and posters which are the copyright of Audi Ingolstadt and thus the services and products will mostly be complementary to those offered by the individual clubs and not compete with them.
What kind of benefits does the ACI Club Card offer ?
As a membership card it provides bona fide evidence that you are a paid up member...As an entitlement card, it offers enormous scope which is only now being developed and has vast potential. It operates in a similar way to a British Nectar Card. A team of people are involved in making agreements with service providers and when this is in place, a list is published and distributed to each club, showing the places to visit and the kind of benefits that have been negotiated on behalf of the ACI member.
As an example, ACI have negotiated discounts on entry fees to car museums and to hotels, they have negotiated bulk purchase agreements on anoraks and clothing accessories.
The ACI member quotes his card number over the telephone when ordering, or shows the card on entry to a museum and gets a discount.
The benefits are thus additional to those your own club has organised and enriches the choice given to the marque enthusiast.
Who issues the Card and what cost implications does it have for my members?
Membership of the ACI has been set at 2 Euros per member. This fee covers things like the membership card
What if I go abroad and want to use the ACI card issued to me in Britain?
The whole idea is the international nature of the card. You would be a member of the ACI and get the benefits associated with use of the Card, so you could visit a hotel in Ingolstadt and visit local museums and each time, get a discount on presentation of the card....or even a free entry, dependng on the agreement negotiated.
What about British entitlements?
This depends on the British Clubs. If there is no agreement to create an ACI UK, there would be no point in setting up benefits which are UK specific. If there is an ACI UK, ACI HQ would look at how it could extend the entitlements to the UK.
Who is the ultimate owner and provider of the ACI ClubCard ?
The card remains the property of the ACI which is a registered organisation. If the card is lost, it can be handed in at the nearest Audi dealer and he would send it back to the ACI.
So there are links to Audi Ingolstadt? so ACI is not independent?
The ACI was set up by the German clubs, to represent the interest of all German Clubs. By getting together and creating a larger lobby, they are able to negotiate better terms with Audi AG and with the the various service and products suppliers to Audi AG.
Audi Ingolstadt are keen for the ACI to flourish. Audi want to be able to deal with a larger organisation. There are existing links to thousands of clubs worldwide. Each has different interests and demands. The idea is to channel the energies of the clubs in a more structured
manner, so that Audi AG can take the various clubs more seriously. The links to Audi are, that Audi AG want to ACI to be successful...but it needs the clubs to join in, to be successful.
What if my Club decides not to be part of the ACI ? In fact, my club has developed contacts with Audi AG and Audi UK, over the years, which are useful, serve my clubs interests well and I don't see any point at all in adding another dimension, when the existing contacts are working so well....
Audi AG is a commercial operation. The Clubs are fundamentally based on enthusiasts who got together to form them. In former years, Audi AG was too busy "moving the metal" and had no formal structure to deal with the clubs...that is why so many varied informal links flourished.
Audi AG is now staffed by a different generation of managers who have a very different attitude to their predecessors. They have a successful precedent to learn from, in the shape of the former factory sponsored "DKW Club Verband": They want to support the marque owners better, but they have a very structured and professional plan as to how how they wish to go about forming the links to the Clubs. The result is the ACI system. The ACI is fundamentally a club of clubs, it works like a Trades Union Congress. Audi want an ACI organisation in each country, which has delegates which Audi call "Ambassadors" who would attend an ACI conference. There, each Club can present any concerns to a similar group of enthusiasts who have similar concerns and if measures are agreed and adopted, a far larger lobby results from this, than for instance, a British Audi club, can achieve on its own.
If the various Clubs decide to join the ACI system, they will reap the benefits of being members of the ACI. The ACI is funded and supported vigorously by Audi AG, but the ACI HQ have considerable freedom to develop the entitlement system their own way.
The funding by Audi AG of the ACI does however have one major result. Those clubs who do not want to be part of the ACI and who see no point to it, can continue to operate independently and do their own thing. Neither ACI nor Audi will want to interfere in a clubs' activities which has after all been created from own energies and own initiative.
However...and this has to be read carefully and digested: Those clubs who do not want to join in the ACI system, will find in future, that they will be excluded from any further formal cooperation by Audi or its affiliates. You will try to obtain services and achieve some level of cooperation with those links you have already developed and may find in future that doors will close or budgetary issues will be referred to the ACI and you would have to join the ACI to obtain funding.
This is because Audi AG would like to set up a professional, commercial structure to the ACI.
But I have developed some really strong links to specific departments at Audi AG and at Audi UK and I dont want to lose those links.
In the short term, those links would be allowed to continue, because they are informal. However that is the problem. To be taken seriously as a professional organisation and once the ACI system is in full swing, there will be pressure from within Audi, to formalise contacts, since Audi AG management want to deal with a few professional organisations and not a myriad of enquiries from clubs and individuals from all over the world, as is the case now.
This process has a sound basis: Audi AG have funds they would allocate to the ACI, for the ACI to flourish. If and only if, an ACI UK were set up, would these funds be released. We are not talking here of small support such as exhibition stands, or cars on loan or the use of stuff from the Audi UK archives...we are talking here of far larger sums which would flow to the ACI UK and which would help the British Audi club scene to flourish in a more guided, structured, professional way.
I am still not convinced, it sounds like a load of bullshit. What about setting up the ACI first and then when I see it works, my club will join in later.
The ACI system will happen. It is a historic inevitability. If your Club does not want to be a founder member of the ACI UK, it is not a problem for ACI...you would just carry on as before, that's fine by us. However, as warned previously, you may find doors starting to close.
Other clubs who see a benefit in the ACI, are welcome to join in and make it flourish: you will set up rules about the relationships and representation of each club within the ACI UK, which reflect UK conditions. Other Clubs should be free to join later and you will have to decide amongst yourselves, whether the basic rules need adapting or whether the new club can join in based on these preestablished rules.
I object to that, vigorously. I have long standing relationships with people at Audi UK and Audi AG and dont see why any doors should close...after all we are an important club and obviously we have a role to play for Audi UK or Audi AG to be so interested in us.
The answer lies in the need to create a more professional structure, a larger lobby. Audi want to take the classic car scene seriously and want to support it...but for the Board of Management of Audi AG to release funds and declare it to be a priority that is worthy of support, with the calculation of Risk that is at the heart of such investment decisions, you have to present a far more structured, professional approach towards Audi.
You must also try to see the world through the eyes of the Board of Management of Audi. They have a different agenda to your own. They would like to give support but it has to be a structured approach.
The ACI system is a means by which Audi AG will channel these funds, to support the Classic car scene. If your club does not want to be part of the ACI, you will not have access to these funds. The funds - and the level of support given, would be larger than those achieved by the informal links you have developed over the years with Audi UK or Audi AG. I got to know German apprentices and students in the 1970s, who shared an interest in DKWs...we helped each other with our hobby, exchanging parts, information, advice...some worked at Audi and over the years, such contacts have helped enrich my own activities in so many ways..i have a bettter archive, a better knowledge of company history, a huge database of workshop manuals, parts books, copies of nearly every poster that Auto Union and subsequently Audi, ever produced, huge stocks of parts, etc, with which I can support the British DKW owner.
Such links are valuable...and they continue and I have been willing to share these contacts with those who need specialist advice...but in future, this will be only on an informal basis. The same applies to all those clubs who subsequently developed their own links within the Audi group of companies and their affiliates. If I want to obtain funding for my Club activities, I will find it more useful to have the support from an ACI UK.
Give me one good example where I could benefit in this way...
Let's take your clubs printing costs as an example. You may have negotiated some rate with some printer that you feel is really low...for a print run of say 300 copies.
If you approached an ACI UK about this, the ACI would negotiate better terms, for you, because it can go to a printer and say, "we have a print run of 300 for one customer but also a print run of 500 for another and 150 for another...+ 200 here and 350 there...and each has different publication dates, so you would have a regular work...and some 3000 magazines to run off instead of just 300..." That would result in a big discount on your existing Clubs expenses...
The concept of ACI UK sounds interesting but it will need a lot of managing...who is going to run this new organisation so that it will be a proper professional lobby for the British Audi, NSU and DKW owner?
Each club has to nominate two delegates who act as a channel of information between the club and the ACI UK. There will for instance, be a club event organised eg by the TT club...the TT club will advise the ACI committee, who circulates the data about this event and other events to all other clubs...and in this way, it unites the community of enthusiasts...and allows a higher number of enthusiasts to know about the event and the club to gain more revenue from gate entry.
As with the setting up of individual clubs, the running of the ACI UK is primarily a voluntary move, powered by enthusiasm for the marque. My own activity at present, in helping to set up the ACI here, whereby I am a facilitator to make it happen, is funded by myself.
In future, when the ACI UK is set up, the managing committee, made up of representatives of the participating clubs, will obtain funds from ACI HQ, which will allow the ACI UK, to run the operation with a larger budget...events would be sponsored or facilitated and the committee of clubs would aim to distribute budgets fairly, so that each club has a better event programme...
but your work input is as voluntary as it is now in the case of your own club activities...
I get a lot of support already and dont see why I should help other clubs, who I see as competitors for a small base of club enthusiasts.
Try to change your thinking, from wanting to "take", to one of wanting to "give"....the classic car scene already has a lot of pressures from outside the scene...you may see other clubs as rivals but you all share the same interests and should try to focus on those areas where you share common ground. That is what the ACI is about...its like a Trades Union...you become a member of an organisation that is dedicated to lobby for your interests, you will aslo gain more friends outside your club. I may be a "deekfreak" but I also own an Audi and it is a quattro..and love the NSU Ro80, whose shape I see every day on the road whenever I look at an Audi 100...and the Audi 100 Coupe S is in my view one of the most significant designs produced by Audi....so there are overlaps in my loyalty to the marque...i dont feel I need to protect the interests exclusively of the DKW owner, as much as to help the whole marque scene.
If the activities of the ACI UK flourish and its activities expand, with the larger funding, its professionalism will attract attention and will get more members wanting to be part of the Audi club scene. All clubs will benefit.