Amicale Citroën Deutschland

Hello all,

after now 2 decades of active works for the Amicale Citroën Internationale (ACI), I have come to a conclusion that it is about time for a change. Let me look back as one of the founding members of the formal ACI about the achievements we have made.

The ACI now is a well-established organization. When I joined the first ACI meetings in 1990, just a few interested activists joined the “conspirative” ACI sessions in the conference rooms at Retromobile. Decisions about ICCCR and other international big events were taken between a few guys and the network of nations did not really exist. Who would be the point of contact for clubs towards the manufacturer, and vice versa, or even amongst clubs? How are ICCCR decisions taken?

Thankfully, the times have changed. With beginning of this decade, the formal establishment of an official, legally settled organization paved the way to establish a partnership with Automobiles Citroën, and I was lucky to be actively involved into the definition of the frameworks which settled the basis for the years to come. The setup of Delegates per country also made it more convenient in day-to-day works for international contacts between clubs and creating awareness. As being one of the ACI Delegates for Germany, I can also assure you that it has proven to be of great benefit for creating an useful network between the nations, and paid out several times in practical works between the Delegates directly, or via the Delegates to the clubs.

And many clubs and their members also can benefit from the ACI establishment: international events such as the ICCCR (International Citroën Car Club Rallye), 2CV World Meetings and other international “Events Of The Year” are now being sponsored by Automobiles Citroën via the ACI. This way, the organizers can substantially benefit from reduced risks in upfront payment for the upcoming events, and a likeliness to run such a project is considerably higher!

With 2004 onwards, we had the first ACI website. With that site, the first ACI logo spread quickly over international sites (many of them still showing it to date) and created another level of awareness that the network is visible within the Citroën fan community. A few hackers tried to compromise our web server a few times over the years and caused quite some sweat and a few sleepless nights, but continuous admin works and maintenance activities have soon closed the backdoors. More than 12.200 emails have been accumulating over all the years, and a few thousand hours of ACI webmaster and communication works are now done. End of 2009, with the relaunch towards a new portal, we had left the old-fashioned email newsletter approach but went to a “journal-style” of communications blog, ready to spread news ad hoc as soon as they’d arrive, And our Twitter account is now connecting us internationally on a new area of social media and bridges the gap to a new generation of “internet Citroënists”.

The ACI Binder came, the basis for your Delegates work – also thanks to the former ACI president Deliaan Vollgraff (NL) who pushed this to be an effective tool for reference over the years. We have this “ACI Bible” now – a written framework and regulations for Delegates, Events, Communications, and many other activities. We have aggregated learnings from the big events so that upcoming organizers can reduce faults and strive to get a professional project executed. The communications workload was immense but paid out – we now have templates for letters, presentations, business cards, flags, counter, rollups, posters, stickers, balloons, lanyards, functional email-addresses and signature templates, a fully-fledged ACI-branded portable booth… you name it. I’d also like to thank our local agency where we jointly had some long sessions to discuss and realize in time the MarCom elements made to create an ACI awareness at the outer world. We do even have been able to use a free-of-charge telephony conferencing tool for the ACI Board.

So as now the ACI communications fundamentals are settled, it is time to move on. Thus I have informed the ACI Board a few weeks ago about my decision, as well as to give some opportunity to other ACI Delegates to join the Board and actively shape the future of the club network.

And there are still a lot of challenges ahead of the ACI:

* continuous updates on proceedings in the ACI Board,
* the spare parts activities, securing the conservation of vintage cars
* the overall heritage works as part of the ACI mission,
* the progress of cooperation with Automobiles Citroën, FIVA and others,
* enhancing the ACI visibility inside and outside Citroën,
* updates from historical or other activities from Citroën which are related to our members interest,
* updates on our own assets and understanding the ACI network,
* updates from Delegates and national info towards the global team,
* developing a strategy to attract new generations of enthusiasts into Citroënthusiasm within a challenging environment,
* and even coaching the Delegates throughout the year and support the clubs behind – a task not to be neglected!

just to mention a few considerations which I have submitted to the Board.

With respect to my personal ambitions, I have decided to focus on local ACI activities for now, and to intensify an already strong network of clubs in our country, and also develop the local partnership with the subsidiary – we have a promising and fruitful cooperation which gives lots of exciting opportunities – stay tuned.

With “Citroën-Strasse”, we have a great family of enthusiasts of all major clubs in Germany, who team up in events like Technoclassica (March 31- April 3, 2011) or in 2011 the “50 years of both Citroën Ami & Andre-Citroen-Club” which we celebrate at the weekend of Pentecost / Whitsunday (June 10-13, 2011) and for the rest of the summer until mid October in “Technik-Museum Speyer” (near Stuttgart, see http://50jahre.ami6.de/). We will keep you in the loop – watch out the local emails resp. our national website at http://www.amicale-citroen.de and we hope that our national example can trigger some similar activities in your country. I also have started to publish more news in German and English on our national website so you can take out some benefits for yourself as well.

I wish you all a pleasant Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, all the best for the years to come, drive safe and carefully. For the ACI-Delegates: Hope to see all of you at Retromobile resp. the ACI AGM 2011.

Best Regards,