Zone Meeting Discussion

Posted by Carl Gerhardt on Feb 14, 2017
 
On 2/14/2017, Real Provencher provided an update on the Zone Meeting he attended. Pictured above is Real Provencher.
 
Real told everyone that a Rotary "Zone" is an area that contains one or more Rotary Districts and that the Zone meeting he attended was for Zones 21b and 27 which is large area which covers districts from Texas to Canada.
 
The meeting Real attended was focused on the fact the Rotary has been losing membership since sometime around 1995. The shrinkage has been significant enough that some Zones have been deleted entirely. After much research into the problem, the Zone leadership has determined that Rotary does not have a recruitment problem but that it does have a retention problem when it comes to membership. Around 41% of all Rotarians have been Rotarians for less than four years. This loss of membership effects our ability to serve others. This can be shown by looking at the amount of money donated to the Rotary Foundation in the last two years. The amount was $58 million. If Rotary membership had increased by only 1% during that time, the $58 million would have been around $66 million.
 
The bottom line is that every Rotarian needs to own the problem. The discussion was then about things we can do as a club to increase membership:
 
  1. Invite a speaker every so often that many people in our community would like to hear from and at that time, invite a friend to come and listen to the speaker without mentioning Rotary. When the guest arrivees, make them feel welcome by having a number of our members say hello and talk them.
  2. Make a connection with guests so that they feel welcome. This means talking to them and finding out about them.
  3. Wear our Rotary shirts in public in order to get prospective members to ask about Rotary.
  4. Take a friend to lunch and get to know them before inviting them to a Rotary meeting.
  5. Have Rotary business cards made uop to hand out.
Carl Gerhardt also talked about the new Club Runner App.
 
        
 
Carl explained how to get the app and showed several uses for the app including the ability to call a member directly from the app if they have a phone number listed in the Club Runner Profile.
 
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