A motorcycle in Israel is a popular way of daily transportation, but most owners stay true to the feeling of fan and freedom.
With all the cohesion of civil society in the country, not only is there no single group for motorcyclists to socialize, but even the schedule of events is different for each group, and you have to be subscribed to a lot of Facebook pages and be present in a lot of WhatsApp chats to find out what’s going on and where.
The language barrier adds to the difficulty of unification. Hebrew is a language spoken by a maximum of 9 million people in the world. The majority, of course, live in Israel, but it is important to realize that new immigrants who have recently moved to Israel and have not had time (or do not intend to) master the language are eager to join like-minded people and develop ties.
This is why most groups, as well as official motorcycle clubs, initially and unambiguously define their language profile.
One of us is an avid motorcyclist and motogymkhana fan. After randomly finding one training organizer and going there, the desire to make a new community was born, which, however, must address the more global goal voiced earlier.
Any endeavor should have a name and an image to identify itself.
The backbone is formed by motorcyclists from Ashkelon and Ashdod, whose passion for the motorcycle world is comparable to a raging flame, so the name chosen is "Ash", that is "אש" in Hebrew — "fire", as well as the first two letters in the names of the cities.
The graphic sign, according to all our principles, was born almost immediately:
Readable letters, winding track and strict minimalism — everything we love and that immediately distances from the usual garish, mottled with unreasonable elements visuals of habitual motorcycle bands.
Simple and readable it is perfect for any branding purpose:
The development of stickers for motorcycle, helmet, visited places is considered in the future. The last one — with a QR code inviting to join the group and send a photo with the found sticker and geotag. Of course, the regulations require that they be applied only to suitable surfaces with the possibility of removal without traces.
Cones were purchased for their own motogymkhana training and a stencil was prepared for branding:
The first training session has already taken place. It differs from the five others visited at that time by building a custom random track, rather than riding over and over again on the same route with the same set of elements (at the time of writing this post we’ve visited the training of another organizer, who operates in the same way).
At the same time, we started to realize the central idea. Having a burning dislike for the popular WhatsApp, we stayed true to ourselves by creating a group @ofanoa (translated from Hebrew as "motorcycle") in Telegram. We’ve divided the group into language-specific topics and "LOL" for photos and videos, which is universal and loved by everyone.
The next step was writing a bot girl named Ashley, which posts upcoming events in each topic in their language on a daily basis. For this purpose, synchronization with the corresponding Google calendars is set up. From now on, everyone with the appropriate permissions can add events in the familiar interface.
Ashley also answers direct questions about events for today/tomorrow/week/month. We plan to expand the bot’s functionality according to users' requests.
Unfortunately, the group did not gain popularity during the week. Once again we encountered local peculiarities. People who are present in many groups are not in a hurry to join another one, the usefulness of which is not quite clear to them.
It would seem that the problem is that Telegram is unpopular here, but experience has shown that almost every newly added contact is registered there as well. The main peculiarity is that in Israel all marketing is based on word of mouth: someone knows something or someone who knows someone else, who can give advice. And everyone tries to minimize the information noise, with which life is already filled.
In any case, the project is interesting to us, we will study in the background and see what will come out of it.
Updated: the project is closed due to lack of demand and sudden change of interest.