Ensure members have the big picture of Rotary
Scott Learned, left, and his father, Kevin, also a Rotarian.
By Scott Learned, District 5400 learning facilitator and former president of the Rotary Club of Boise, Idaho, USA.
My parents, both Rotarians, brought me to my first Rotary meeting when I was 6 years old. I even assisted my dad with a presentation on how user-friendly and helpful computers could be. I was engaged even back then!
But participant engagement is not a given. Like many clubs, the Rotary Club of Boise, Idaho, USA sometimes faced challenges retaining members.
In my role as a club leader, I’d look over exit interviews for clues on how to keep people engaged. It became clear that some exiting members hadn’t been fully introduced to the big picture of Rotary. They didn’t understand how they were part of something bigger and how their work could travel far beyond their club and impact lives in other communities and even other continents.
The familiarity I’d grown up with was missing. As my district’s Rotary Action Plan champion, I saw that gap as an opportunity to support the plan’s priority of enhancing participant engagement. I started by talking about engagement with our club members and other clubs in my district, rounding out what I’d learned from the exit interviews I’d conducted.
I learned that many other clubs faced the same situation, and several had started revamping their club’s introductory and welcome tools. These ideas and materials formed the basis of Rotary 101, a program designed to ensure that all members have the baseline understanding of Rotary so they can find meaningful ways to be engaged.
Our goal is to educate and empower members. We want every Rotarian to understand the avenues available to them to make an impact locally and globally.
This Rotary introduction covers essential aspects of our global network, including local club dynamics, Rotary International’s structure, and the work of The Rotary Foundation. By clarifying Rotary’s structure and highlighting transformative projects, members get a deeper understanding of Rotary’s global impact.
Newer members might discover that there’s more to Rotary than what comes up at social events and in early conversations. And long-term members might find new ways to remain people of action for life.
A valuable component of the course is the participant survey. Through this survey, we can continue to refine course content to reflect member interest and needs. This is similar to Rotary’s customizable Member Satisfaction Survey. By regularly asking members for feedback and responding to their input, clubs can identify what members like and dislike about their club experience and address concerns and preferences.
This “take a leap and make it your own” mentality is one of the key ideas our Rotary introduction seeks to spark and nurture. If there’s a project or issue that interests you, it’s very likely there’s a Rotarian working on it, and you’re within an introduction or two from meeting them and taking action. Rather than six degrees of separation, at Rotary it’s only two or three degrees of separation, because our global network connects people all over the world with a common intent to do good. To me, that truly is the power of Rotary that I hope everyone sees.
Visit the Action Plan page on Rotary.org to find the Action Plan Toolkit and resources to help enhance engagement, including the Member Satisfaction Survey.