SteveSheldon

OK Guys this is the final summary for our 2016 Annual Convoy & Meet event.. after this I will be kicking off the threads for our next event in 2017. This event started in the planning back in September 2015, with the aim of increasing the numbers to 80 vehicles, with more sponsorship involvement, with a high level of sponsor visibility at the event itself. Our previous event threads had received up to 20,000 or so hits, and it would have been nice to beat that, raising the visibility of our event. In the 8 months of planning and development, our event aims changed significantly. We upped the target number of Jaguars to the maximum we could possibly squeeze into Madiera Drive, with our sponsors offering bigger prizes for our prize draw, a new prestigeous award was announced as the 'JaguarForums.com Best Turned Out Jaguar' which would run every year, & more sponsors than ever came on board. Towards the day we were actually turning people away because we could not cater for more vehicles at the site, and the Welcome Packs, despite being increased in numbers were still running out in relation to the numbers coming. This event took us to the very limits of what we could do, with the event in it's current format.. smashing all our previous records. We had 100 Jaguars, over 60 years of Jaguar production on-site, bigger and better prizes than ever before, our Twitter feed over doubled it's number of followers, our Facebook page doubled it's friends, we started storing our images from all our events at our Facebook page, and a OneDrive account making them free to access and download, we gained an official event photographer in CarSnapped to take superb shots for us on the day, and we gained an official event filmer (is that a phrase? :-)) to film our events features! As for visibility, we had threads on three Jaguar specific forums, and one general motoring forum and all our updates appeared on all of them plus our Facebook page. We also used our Twitter account to advertise our sponsors (part of the deal for improved sponsorship). We are now quite well known on Twitter, our Facebook page is regularily monitored by our Facebook friends, our event photo collections are also regularily viewed, and our forum threads in total received over 102,000 views, which is almost five times as many as our last event! Our event has grown, event on event, year on year, and still this year the general concensus was that people enjoyed the event. We have 5 event sponsors that had agreed to support our 2017 event before our 2016 event had even finished, and within weeks we had just under 40 people presigning for our next event.. This event did have some issues becoming very apparent with this event, as we had reached the absolute limit that our location on Brighton seafront could handle. The parking costs, parking slots, catering, and the spread of this number of vehicles along the drive all becoming quite big issues, even the risk of sponsors dropping out at the last minute became an issue. So, we have two options - we either downsize our event enabling us to retain Madeira Drive as our main venue, and continue to hunt for a financial sponsor to cover the costs involved in taking over Madiera Drive.. or we move our event and continue growing it to the size of commercially funded Jaguar events, but keeping our event free for everyone to attend and owned and run by us, the attendees.. I have looked at both options and am pleased to say that I have located a new venue for the event enabling us to keep growing our event.. giving us more Jaguars, more years of production, more sponsors, more prizes, and even a one day format rather than the current half day format. All the details of the new event will be in our new forum threads which I will be starting off shortly.. I believe that we can make our event bigger and better for all of us.. so please set a date in your calendar, and sign up on the new thread and help us make our event THE Jaguar event that everyone should attend.. If you know anyone who hasn't attended before please let them know we are getting bigger and better and get them to sign up for what promises to be a huge grass roots Jaguar event.. as always it will be free to sign up for, & free to attend whilst still giving you great goodie bags, chances at some great prizes that you will genuinely use, plus some fantastic discount codes to help keep your Jaguar costs down. I am hoping that in this event you have found something you want to be involved in, and that you enjoy attending.. and very much hope to meet you again at our next convoy & meet event in 2017 :-)

Just a quick update for everyone.. Carphile.com and MotorMartin who were advertising sponsors for our 2016 event, have officially signed up to support our 2017 event. Many, many thanks to both of them for their continued support. I have been chasing Harwoods Jaguar regarding who we deal with at our new venue, Denbies, and I am waiting to hear back. As soon as I know this I can start to work on developing a good working relationship to ensure we get the best Jaguar support possible for our event. I have also been progressing things with our other current sponsors, and a select list, I have, of potential sponsors - more to follow on that as we go. Our next event will continue our trend of growing our event, and adding new features.. I am planning on 200 Jaguars for the day, ideally covering at least 60 years of production so please add the 28th of May 2017 to your calendar, keep an eye out for the 2016 event summary appearing on our threads tomorrow, and the new thread starting for our 2017 event We have the biggest, and best Annual Convoy & Meet event to come You will not want to miss it.. a scenic countryside drive from our usual starting point coursing through Sussex and Surrey countryside to Denbies Wine Estate (which will be filmed ), where we will have an enclosed grassed area set aside for up to 400 Jaguars. There will be the usual features that everyone loves, as well as tours of the Denbies wine estate, tasting sessions and so much more. We will hopefully have CarSnapped onsite taking yet more fantastic shots of the cars and the event, more prizes in the prize draw, and we will be moving the event from it's half day format to a full day! We will likely have a cup or plaque for the first time for the winner of our 'JaguarForums.com Best Turned Out Jaguar' award to be won with the winner passing it on to the next winner in 2018.. and so much more that I am working on for us..

A quick update for you.. So far we have Autoglym, Scratchshield, Lancaster Insurance, & Rimmer Bros all confirmed as sponsors for our next bigger, and better Jaguar event. Steve from CarSnapped is also hoping to be available for us on the day. I am just waiting on further responses from our other sponsors and current sponsors.. Additionally I am looking into sorting an award plaque or cup (rather than just prizes) for the 'JaguarForums.com Best Turned Out Jaguar' award - which would mean the previous years winner will get to pass the award on to the new winner each year. You will also get to display it at home for the year as the winner!! Proof to your friends and family that you truly have the best turned out Jaguar :-)

I will be summarising our 2016 event at the end of this week, looking back over our achievements and kicking off the thread for our 2017 event. Currently we have a brand new, highly recommended, venue in Denbies Wine Estate.. with a capacity for up to 400 vehicles - who would also be very happy to become our long term venue should we wish. We have 37 people who have made advance bookings for our 2017 event. We have retained a number of our sponsors, and I am following them up currently, some having already responded positively. Harwoods Jaguar are currently looking into who we can deal with as a Jaguar representative at the new venue. So, our Jaguar event is still very much on the move to bigger and better year on year.. Please keep an eye on this thread, and the forthcoming thread for 2017 for all the latest

OK guys, it is official as of now.. hot off the press (or the keyboard) our event has a new venue for next year.. We will be retaining everything from our previous events, but making it a day event rather than it's current half day event format, and scaling things up (again). We are booked as an official event at Denbies Wine Estate www.denbies.co.uk for Sunday 28th May 2017. We now have capacity for up to 400 Jaguars in open parking. As soon as I have more info I will update everyone.

Please note Richard Morgan has very kindly passed me his photos from the day, & they are now available on our Facebook event page, and our OneDrive account if you would like to check them out.

OK everyone.. I will be actively updating this thread until the end of the week, when I should be signed off on everything for this year. At that point I will summarise everything to do with our 2016 event and take a brief look back at what we achieved this year! We have achieved a lot, for an event that has been running for just three and a half years, and has no financial funding :-) Just to give you an inkling of things to come - I have been accepting advance bookings from people wanting to attend next years event, and have had a number of locations, and sponsors actively chasing me to work with them. There are a number of possibilities that I am working my way through, but whichever way it works we will definitely be going up market next year, with a brand new regular venue for our event. This I am hoping will give us a little more swing not just with our current sponsors, but hopefully some new additional sponsors too. My family, on whom I have depended for a huge amount of support, and a lot of help with things over the past three and a half years, have all agreed that these new potential locations are a huge change and improvement, and will be coming along this time to meet everyone!! I cannot confirm any specific details 100% at this point, but I know our new look event in 2017 is going to blow the doors off this years event :-) We will have a superb backdrop for photo shoots, coupled with more time onsite, free parking, shopping, location tours and so much more I cannot list yet. All in addition to the usual event features everyone loves so much with the range of Jaguars, socialising, photo shoots, and prize draw!! Anyone wanting to guarantee their slot in advance, please just drop me a pm, email, or a facebook message, or a good old fashioned tweet. Please keep an eye on this thread for any latest info between now and the end of the week, and then at the end of the week keep an eye open for the summary for this years event. Some point shortly after there will be a new thread appearing with all the details of our fantastic Jaguar event for 2017 :-)

Just a very quick update - in view of the issues with our Brighton venue I will be moving this event to a new (to be announced in September) venue for next year. We currently have a number of quite select venues that have said they would be very happy to host our event - spaces may (depending on the venue) be limited so advance booking may be needed to guarantee a slot on what promises to be an even better event than this years!! So, if you would like to guarantee yourself a slot on our next event please drop me an email, pm, tweet, or facebook msg sooner rather than later, as requests for slots on this more prestigeous event than ever are already coming in! Not only this, but we already have sponsors asking to be involved!! It is set to be a premium Jaguar event, free to sign up for, free to attend, and even free parking for your Jaguar this time!! Please get in touch if you would like to attend, or get involved with our next event :-)

OK Guys, I have been getting text responses, and emails from both sponsors and attendees of this years event all looking forward to next years event so it looks like I have the start of an event again lol However I am currently mulling over our options - we need to make next years event bigger, and most importantly better for everyone. Where I believe as a whole our past five events have been well received and a good experience for attendees there are things I have been unable to get perfect for everyone, and I would love to try to nail those issues with our sixth event. Namely our issues have been parking, parking costs, and the issue with the cars stretching over too long a section of road for the event to be cohesive.. I am very open to venues and would appreciate any pointers to locations or organisations that may be able to assist us - bearing in mind that not only is this event free to attend, but we have no financial support. The only option for potential sponsors is advertising - which we have done this year, quite extensively, for our sponsors via Twitter, Facebook & the forum threads. I am also looking at whilst the event needs to remain free to ensure anyone and everyone can attend, it may be worth making a small charge for prize draw tickets on the day, and then using that money to generate cash prizes for attendees on top of the the very kind and generous donations from our event sponsors making the prize draw (which everyone loves) even bigger and better.. Anyone with any thoughts or ideas is welcome to drop me a line via one of the forums, facebook, or even twitter - I am very, very open to suggestions and will follow up on anything that we can possibly integrate into our event to make it even better.

Prestige Car Care Shop has also come forward saying they would be happy to sponsor next years event... which is great news for us. I will be looking into alternate venues for next years event, and already have a couple of possible leads for us which may result in a less spread out event, which is always an issue with Madiera Drive, and no parking costs for us. The date is currently set as 29th May 2017. You will likely get a text from me over the next few days just touching base, checking up on how you feel this years event went for you, and enquiring if you might be interested in next years event - please let me know regarding both :-) I will update everyone as I go with things, as always via the forums, and our twitter and facebook accounts.. :-) In the meanwhile please don't forget we have the following discount codes for you to help you keep your Jaguar costs down: Our event sponsor Furniture Clinic specialise in leather care - something all Jaguar owners can make good use of! They are offering event attendees a great 15% discount on their entire product range. Just use the checkout code 'JagMeet15' to claim your discount. Wax On Wax Off is offering event attendees a huge 20% off their entire product range! Just log on to Wo Wo online, have a browse through their great range and use the checkout code of 'JAG20' for any purchases. Prestige Car Care is offering all attendees a 10% discount on their entire product range which includes some superb car cleaning products - to take advantage of this great offer go to Featured Products - Prestige Car Care Shop and use the checkout code 'jags' to get your event attendee discount! And Scratchshield.co.uk can help you keep your car scratch free for our event with a huge 25% discount using the checkout code ' JAGBRI16'

I have just done some basic maths here (trust me it has to be basic lol) and here are the vital stats from our 2016 event: We achieved...... Our Fifth Ever JaguarForums.com Brighton Convoy & Meet Event 100 Jaguars attended 62 years of Jaguar production were covered Approximately £500 of Prizes were won, donated by Seven Contributing Sponsors Our first ever JaguarForums.com Best Turned Out Jaguar award was awarded Our Forum threads amassed over 98,000 views Our event Twitter feed 167 followers inc some huge industry names Our Facebook event page was launched and gained 39 friends We created, and got to enjoy, our biggest Brighton event to-date. An event that broke all our previous records for this event :-) Huge and massive thanks to all of us - the sponsors to the supporters, the attendees to our advertisers.. thankyou everyone.

Does anyone have experience of producing advertising artwork, as we have been offered a 1/4 page advertising slot for free but need to produce the artwork for it by the end of the month in order to take advantage of it. Could anyone who could help please drop me a line?

Just to let you know... One of our event sponsors, Rimmer Bros has a 'Genuine Jaguar Collection Clothing and Regalia Sale' on (surprising what we can set off with our event :-)) so please have a look at http://www.rimmerbros.co.uk/content--name-Jaguar-Collection-Blowout-Sale and see if there is anything there you might like.. everything imaginable is there..

If you have been considering using your PVD valeting & detailing voucher you may be interested in their magazine - please see here: www.pro-valets.co.uk/magazine If you do decide to grab a copy please make sure you mention JaguarForums.com as if you do grab a copy or two, PVD will guarantee us a quarter page advert for our next event in 2017. Additionally some good news - Holiday Inn Express Crawley, and ScratchShield have both already said they would like to be involved in next years event :-)

Welcome to our JaguarForums.com Brighton Convoy & Meet event for 2016. The weather was good on the day, especially considering that it had been raining just the day before. It was 7:15am on the day when Paul & Tia (PaulJag) pulled up outside my house - both in XJ's. A sight that I could happily enjoy any day of the year - three XJs outside :-) Paul and Tia packed what I hadn't been able to fit in my XJ and we set off for Pease Pottage Services. I was well chuffed because I was completely organised and due to be at the start of the event in plenty of time for the first time ever. As we pulled into Pease Pottage Services there were Jaguars all over the place, and groups of people chatting in the car park. Steve from CarSnapped was at the entrance getting lots of shots of arriving cars - he had been there since sometime just after 6am I believe!! It was then that I realised that all my change for the car parking at Brighton was still at home (so much for the first time ever :-)) so I left Paul & Tia to get things setup whilst I popped back home to get my change (£16 of change - Brighton is not cheap nowadays). On getting back to Pease Pottage I found Paul & Tia completely on top of things - everything was laid out, and attendees were all busy signing in and collecting their goodies. Afterwards I found out that Paul & Tia have run events in the past - they were incredible :-) Many thanks to them for the copious amounts of help and support through the day! We managed to collect the majority of the people into the conservatory area and ran through the days itinerary prior to everyone heading off for Brighton seafront. Some Jaguars made it down in advance of the main convoy, with others grouping together just prior to entering Brighton. There was the usual problems with the traffic lights and controls breaking the convoy up but we managed to keep the general grouping right down to Madiera Drive. There was, for a short while, a huge queue of Jaguars waiting on parking, with others parking, and a few already parked - definately marking Madiera Drive as Jaguar territory for a short while at least. The parking meters gave us problems as usual.. the most common issue being that they would take all but £2 of what you needed to insert, and then reject all the coins you had inserted.. but eventually everyone was sorted and headed in for breakfast. Whilst everyone was in for breakfast I went round all the cars trying to get some good shots.. admittedly no where near as good as the shots CarSnapped managed to get.. my shots are here: https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=D7AB1E40951CBB8F!1838&authkey=!AK84oyfOasOM8uU&ithint=folder%2cJPG and you are very welcome to viw them, and download any that you especially like free. After breakfast there were huge amounts of people looking around the cars.. we had everything from a Project 7 through to E-Types, Mk II, a 420 and so much more. Tony was there from Harwoods with the all new F-Pace and was attracting quite a lot of interest.. The majority of the cars had dashboard sheets on the dash so they could be considered for the new prestigeous JaguarForums.com award of 'Best Turned Out Jag' for 2016 making it easy to see who was with our event. Holiday Inn Express Crawley arrived onsite just before the Prize Draw to personally hand over an unexpected prize of a free nights accomodation - Many thanks to them for that! There was some issues late morning with the parking, resulting in things being moved forward so the Prize Draws and the new 'Best Turned Out Jag' Award presentations all kicked off at about 12:30 if I remember correctly. We had some fantastic prizes, all drawn by Tony from Harwoods, with the finale being a bottle of champagne from Harwoods Jaguar and a superb luxury car shampoo and polisher set from PrestigeCarCareShop for the JaguarForums.com 'Best Turned Out Jaguar' The day was a great Jaguar day out - absolute luxury with the range of cars we had attending on the day! Our prizes included, to list just a few of, a dashcam, filter cleaning systems, workshop manuals, vouchers, mugs, a free nights accomodation, champagne, luxury shampoo... and so so much more. Huge thanks go to the following companies who got involved this year, and in some cases went beyond anything I could have hoped for: Harwoods Jaguar Brighton, Carsnapped, SNG Barratt, WaxOn-WaxOff, Autoglym, Haynes Manuals, Scratch Shield, Furniture Clinic, PVD, Moto Services, Holiday Inn Express Crawley, Rimmer Bros, Lancaster Insurance, NextbaseUK, Revs UK, We love Brighton, JagTechnic, The Automatic Gearbox Centre, Carphile, Revs UK and MotorMartin. Massive thanks go to everyone who attended this years event, and anyone else I have not mentioned who took the time to get involved and help make this the biggest and best event we have run to-date. Please remember that the discount codes listed in this thread should work right through to close to our next event too!! Helping our event keep your Jaguar running costs to a minimum. And finally please keep an eye out for the thread for our next event :-)