MARCH 12, 2019 ROTARY IN REVIEW:  Kristin Geer

Posted by Linda Mulhern on Mar 13, 2019

At 12:15 pm on March 12th, President John Chandler called the meeting to order at the Intercontinental Hotel. Laurie Murphy lead the club in the Pledge of Allegiance and as part of the invocation quoted Helen Keller, “Optimism, the faith to lead to achievement”. Sherry Howe introduced a number of guests, including Peter Grayson, a former president of the club and father to current member, James Grayson. Linda Mulhern was the scribe for the meeting and Susan O’Neil greeted members as they arrived.

The meeting was a reminder for all members of the role of women within Rotary. In 1987, the Supreme Court decision ruled that Rotary could not discriminate based on gender. Lindsay Moser talked about 1905 being the start of Rotary, but even in 1964, with Bob Dylan’s song, “The Times, They are a-changin”, Rotary was not yet inclusive for women. Luckily, Club #10 has had women included with the club since 1989, including Carolyn Brusseau, who later became president in 1994-95, Nancy McKillips who became president in 2005-06 and Carla Hauge in 2015-16, as well as our administrators, Sherry Howe and Jodi Erickson.

Brianna Vujovich was able to give Paul Harris Awards to both Jason Bradshaw and Susan O’Neil at the meeting based on the fund raising done in November. New member introductions included Ginny Arthur from Metro State, who was introduced by Nancy McKillips, who bequeathed her original Rotary pin to Ginny. Doug Bruce introduced Crissy Kochendorfer and Katie Shaw. Crissy is well known to Doug because her son played goalie on Doug’s son’s team.
 
Kristin Geer was introduced to the club. She is the CEO of Bleachr and she has a office in downtown Minneapolis. Kristin has always been active in communications and believes it started with a speech to the local VFW in her hometown of Perham. She spoke about “hotdish” as a mirror to the melting pot of the people in Minnesota. She worked for a number of years as a reporter at KSTP. She later got her master’s degree from John Hopkins in digital communications. Her company, Bleachr creates sport apps for mobile devices in which fan engagement is the platform and strategy for any company seeking to promote to a target audience and to fulfill their needs. They build apps through a loyalty and rewards program, which is important to super fans and even “fanatics” of a particular sport. Rewards might include gaining points to buy a hotdog or beer at a baseball game. They will then continue to participate at games in the future by fulfilling the need which is ultimately what any team wants with their fan base. Colleges are now starting to work with her firm as well. They have found that people do not want to be spoken to from their TVs any longer, but rather want to communicate via their mobile devices for information needed. In particular, people are looking at their mobile devices for information 39% of time versus TV at 31% of the time. People use their mobile devices to check into social media 36% of the time and are even gaming 11% of the time when using them. The only problem at sporting events with mobile devices is the lack of bandwidth at most stadiums which were not wired to handle the demand of thousands of users currently at a game or match, but they are starting to work on improving the bandwidth within the older stadiums.
 
Another opportunity for the apps created,  will be with sports betting opening up with the recent Supreme Court decision and state governments opening up the possibilities. Bleachr is also able to provide detailed data to their sponsors as to who is using the apps, how often and the length of time used which is normally 5-6 minutes versus 30 seconds for most users. Sponsor challenges are often finding that 400-500 fans are participating,  taking pictures as part of a challenge to gain points as part of the rewards program provided by the app. The “Super Fans” will return again and again by spending money on tickets and merchandise, which is what ultimately the companies want from the money spent to promote themselves. John provide a certificate to Kristin for speaking to the club and a donation will be made to the Reading to Me program with the St Paul Library.
 
President John reminded the club that at the 3/19 meeting, we will learn more about Rotaract and the 3/26 meeting will be a Rotation day for the club.
The meeting was adjourned at 1:17 pm.
 
 

Respectfully submitted,

 

 

 

 

 

Linda Mulhern
Scribe