Open Day: A Great Success

4WD’ing in Bendigo and Central Victoria is huge. The number of 4wd’s you see on the road out here – from tradie utes to family wagons, stock and modified, is far greater than you see in the capital cities. There’s no doubt that we like our off roaders, and 4wd clubs have always been a great way to meet some new people, and find a way to get out on a camping trip and do it safely.

I look after media for the club, and being a very new club this is a point of focus, especially online media. To achieve the club’s goals, we needed to get our name out there, show people what we do and build a community of keen 4wd’ers and campers.

We planted the brochure in a few places around Bendigo and also used it on our Facebook

The idea

With online media working well since we established the website and Facebook; and lots of trips happening (and trip reports and photos going up on the site), we wanted to direct some attention to local media so that we could talk to some people in the community about our club. The idea was “let’s see if the local paper will run an article about the club, and we’ll run an open day”.

We had 3 objectives:

• Talk to the public about 4wd’ing and what the club does to increase awareness
• See if we can get the Addy to publish an article about the club
• Provide our sponsors with an opportunity to also promote their businesses

The concept:

• Bring some 4WD’s into Hargreaves Mall, and set up a vehicle display
• Have business cards and handouts for people who might be interested in joining
• Run a sausage sizzle to cover the club’s costs
• Get in touch with the Advertiser a month in advance and see what we can do

I thought, the worst thing that can happen, is a few members show up in the mall, we all have a nice chat, and go home – so it was going to be a win, whether the public were interested or not.

The Bendigo Advertiser shoots some club members and vehicles

The article

After sending through some info on the club, the newspaper article ended up happening. They got in touch 2 weeks prior to the open day, did a photo shoot with some members and a few of our vehicles and published a half page article with a great photo in the weekend edition.

After the article was published, our website saw a big increase in traffic and our Facebook group ‘likes’ doubled in only a few days. The comments, likes, shares and views on Facebook in the lead-up was very encouraging, but we still didn’t have much of an idea of how many people would come down, so we were just going to have to get there and see.

The club, officially in print!

The article is still available online here.

On the day

9am and I met Russ, Jim, Andrew and Steve in the Mall, with the BBQ trailer and vehicles in place I got to work setting up the posters and putting together hand-outs with some information on the club and upcoming trips. The decision was made to only charge $1 for snags and drinks; the point of the day wasn’t to make a profit, it was just to talk to people, and if we covered some of our costs from the BBQ, we’d be grateful. Russ had put together a BBQ trailer for the club in the lead-up, and this made things quite easy and straight forward, and was also something we could take away with us on future trips.

We had everything set up by 10, and we were also joined by Naomi. We had a bit of a hiccup with the sausages for the BBQ being frozen, and ended up picking up fresh sausages from Coles and got to work on the BBQ with Naomi. While we were catering for hungry Mall-goers, Russ, Jim, Andrew and Steve were talking to 4wd’ers who had come down to find out more about the club.

We had a constant stream of people wanting to talk to us about the club, families, 4wd’s and the trips they’d been on or wanted to go on, and we had a fairly constant stream of people coming through from 10am to around 1.30pm when it started to die down.  Info sheets and trip calendars were handed out and we also had information and give-aways from our sponsors Harrisons and TJM.

Because we’ve run some really interesting and varied trips over the past few months, we were able to put up posters of trip reports and photos from the Butcher Country, Central Gippsland and Wyperfeld trips. The idea here is, rather than talk about what we do, we’ll just show it!

We also had another poster with full trip calendars for 2018 and 2019 (24 trips over 2 years) and a lot of people were surprised at how many trips we had on the horizon. We figure if we can run the trips and have a full and interesting trip calendar, we’ll keep members happy and engaged with the club, trips are pretty much our raison d’être.

Many were interested in the number of trips we are running

We finished up the day at 2ish as planned, packed up and rolled out of the Mall. As a bit of a de-brief and social gathering, a few of us caught up at Russ’ place in Bridgewater to do camp ovens around the fire for dinner and rolled out the swags. We were joined here by Narelle, Paul and Fiona.

Post-trip camp fire at Russ’ place for a debrief and catchup

Wrap up and thanks

Thanks for coming and having a chat with us! We enjoyed the day and we hope you did as well.

For me, the day and the lead-up exceeded my expectations. We got to talk to lots of genuine people and families who really enjoyed their 4wd’s and wanted to find a way to do it more often. The club’s name is well and truly out there, and we welcome anyone who wants to join us on a trip or become a member of the club with open arms.

I also want to pass on thanks to Russ, Jim, Andrew, Steve and Kim for coming down to volunteer as well as some of the members parents who arrived a bit later, TJM and Harrisons, Chris and Glenn from the Bendigo Advertiser for the media coverage and Karen from the City of Greater Bendigo for coordinating with us for use of the Mall.

-Tim