OGAE CLUBS- A WIDE CHOICE After some reactions from certain Australians, I think it is important to write about this. These days we live in a GLOBAL world and it is also so in the various OGAE clubs. The last few years the clubs opened up for people from everywhere. In the past, if you were someone from Spain, you had to join OGAE Spain unless you had a very good reason why you could not belong to that club and wanted membership of another club. Rest of the world therefore could have just members in countries without own OGAE clubs. This has changed drastically and I think about 20% of OGAE fans have membership of two clubs. I know that especially fans of Switzerland and Austria also are members of OGAE Germany because they bring out a wonderful Eurovision magazine (in the German language). If you therefore feel your needs are not being met at OGAE Rest of the world, you have an option to join any of the other 42 or so OGAE clubs. If you have time and money, you could actually be a member of each and every club, if they accept you. It has especially happened that fans from the over subscribed clubs like UK and Spain where the ticket package demand is always higher than the supply, look also to be a member of another club, especially those who do not take part in EUROVISION like Andorra, Turkey, Bulgaria, Luxembourg, etc because they feel the ticket demands will be lower in such clubs. Of course each club has its own rules in allocating tickets and since we do not have info on how each club allocates ticket packages, we just think that each club give priority to their own citizens. This year for Copenhagen we had requests from fans in Denmark, Netherlands, Spain, Finland and Belgium who were unsuccessful in their own countries and they inform us of the reasons why – in most cases it was because they were told they have been a member for a too short time. Rest of the world does not 1 – promote actively membership 2 – hardly ever accept people from countries who have own clubs unless he/she has a good reason why he/she cannot be a member of that club. We have only 10 such members and most have been personality clashes with someone in the board of that county. In 2007 we had 200 Finnish fans temporary with us after leadership crises, but the moment it was solved these Finnish members went back to OGAE Finland. Just yesterday OGAE Slovakia wrote to us to ask if we can bring them in contact with the Slovak members of rest of the world. As Slovakia is now an own club and a neighbour of Austria, they could be a high priority for double membership. It makes it even better since they do not take part, so it clearly looks like an attractive alternative if TICKET ALLOCATION is your only reason for joining a fan club. We are writing this solely to show you that you as a fan has alternatives if you think Rest of the world are not meeting your needs. We do not want to force any fan to join us. We are aware that some people regard the ticket allocation as the top priority and we have spent a great deal of time to be as fair and open and transparent as possible over this issue. But clearly, we will be unable to please everybody this year, so we are doing this as early as possible, so you have a lot of time to plan. In most clubs ticket allocation for 2015 has not even been discussed and will be on their agenda only after their summer vacation. It is important to put all alternatives on the table for fans, as I strongly believe that each person reacts differently to what is important to him or her as a fan.
Posted on: Tue, 03 Jun 2014 13:22:56 +0000
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