During our training to be President of the Club, we are reminded of the importance of having a vision for your year of what you want to achieve. My vision was for more participation by the members in the running of the club; and more connection with the Club and the community. I feel that we have to make Rotary relevant in the community and that, unlike the practice for many years of hiding our light under a bushel, we need to be more PR driven in everything we do.
Rotary International have done a lot of research around the Rotary brand. It will not come as a shock to anybody that the Rotary symbol is widely recognised! That is the good news … the bad news, they found, is that very few people have any idea what Rotary actually does. This led me to developing my theme for the year of connect and inspire. We need to connect to the community by having the key decision makers in the community come to our meetings and see for themselves what it is that we do. We also need to have joint meet ups with the other service clubs to find out what they do and how they differ from us.
While Rotary may have high recognition in the community through our logo, it is not really achieving its goal if that recognition does not lead to new members. This, currently, seems to be the case. We do get a certain amount recognition through the various projects that we have done; but that does not translate into new members. There are many reasons why we are not gaining members (and we are not alone in not gaining members - the same is true for many clubs); some of them are to do with the change in work patterns of younger people these days; some of them are due to us not broadcasting the good that we do in the community. Young people today are reluctant to commit to the standard Rotary requirements of a weekly meeting etc. To be fair, Rotary has changed the rules to reflect this … but, again, maybe we have not broadcasted that as loudly as we need to.
It is my hope that setting up an organisation like Friends of Rotary (FoR) we can give potential new members and easy route into finding out about us and the good we do in the community. The idea is that they join us in some of our projects and our social activities and we get to know them and they get to know us. Through these interactions, it is hoped, we can convert them into full time members of our existing club or of a new satellite club when the time is ready for them.
I intend to get the FoR meeting on a regular basis in the near future. Please help me make this a success.
.jpg){kind=logo}
