I have been thinking about ways to attract new members to our Rotary Clubs. I am convinced that we could significantly enhance our ability to attract new members by making our activities visible to other people via the web.
So, here’s the bottom line up front – we need to be on the web as individual Rotarians, Clubs, and Districts (Rotary International already has a good web presence and is not the subject of this article).
This article is focused on one aspect of what we can do as individuals to attract new members to our Rotary clubs via the web. It’s not something we can leave to the District or somebody else – I strongly believe that we, as members, need to take this action.
You'll remember bank robber Willie Sutton’s famous retort to someone who asked him why he robbed banks: “Because that’s where the money is!” Well – the vast majority of new potential members are on the web. Hundreds of millions of potential new members!
To survive as a viable organization, much less thrive, we must reach out actively and aggressively to potential new members. We have to do this as Rotary Clubs, and we must do so individually. Forget the old ways - word of mouth, paper-based advertising, and all the other "tried and true methods". They used to work. They still do work, but not very effectively, because the world of potential new members has moved online.
Each one of us individually needs to take action, and we need to do so now. Wait wait wait – before any of you folks out there who are already swearing and throwing vegetables at me head out to the bar, hear me out. A good friend of mine taught me to use the web when he was eighty years old. He taught himself how to use that clunky dinosaur of a web back in the early 1990’s, thus proving that "an old sea dog can learn new tricks.“
Twenty-five years later, I am convinced that not only must we follow in his wake, we must do so now. It is well past time for us to be online as Rotarians, and to be online in interesting and exciting ways. As individuals, I believe we must make our Clubs, Rotary International and our knowledge and enthusiasm visible and accessible to potential new members on the web.
What do we need from such a system?
- First, it has make us visible on the web to tens of millions of potential new members. (There are more than 3 billion people on the web now).
- Second, it has to be free to us, and them.
- Third, it has to be easy to use for everyone involved.
- Fourth, it has make it easy for new members to find us, our Clubs, and our activities, and, in turn, make it easy for us to interact with visitors to our sites.
- Fifth, the photographs we upload have to be protected the way the owner wants them to be.
That’s a pretty tall order. Yet, such systems exist for us to use right now.
Storage requirements have increased over the past 25 years since my old sea dog friend led the way. We’ve moved from using tiny little hard drives capable of storing a few photographs to much larger drives capable of storing thousands or even tens of thousands of photographs, videos and scanned documents. The problem with hard drives is that they can and do fail fairly frequently. Even when they're backed up annually, they can still fail. When that happens, the user generally loses everything not yet backed up elsewhere. So, over the past five or ten years, cloud-based systems have come into wide-spread use.
A cloud-based system is just a very large, remote, hard drive. Instead of using the hard drive in your computer, the hard drive is located in a large, air-conditioned building somewhere, designed to store nothing more than very large hard drives. Now, the remote location is usually referred to as “up in the cloud”. It doesn't matter, really, where those remote drives are located as long as you can get to your data anytime you need it, and that you can protect that data as you wish. Typically, one buys space on that remote “cloud-based server” on a monthly basis to store digital material. Over the past five years, cloud-based servers have become more ubiquitous. There’s been more competition, and, to attract new users, several companies have been offering a lot of free space to users to attract them to their service. Amazon is one such company – and so is Flickr (pronounced ‘flicker”). Carbonite is another.
I'm not paid by any of them – I'm just a user. I use the space provided by Amazon since I'm an Amazon Prime subscriber, but I'm going to focus here on Flickr. Everything in this article from now on is oriented towards that company. Flickr, which has been around for a decade (it’s owned by SmugMug, now) is the largest photo database in the world – it stores more than twenty times the amount of material stored in the Library of Congress. Photographs, documents, videos – it’s all there on Flickr.
Here’s a quick Flickr snapshot: 112 million users in 63 countries sharing a million photos a day, with 10 billion stored images. (source: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/flickr-stats/ ). The numbers are staggering! Institutions as diverse as the US Library of Congress, the British Museum, and well over one hundred other cultural institutions world-wide have made great swaths of their holdings available to the public on Flickr. “…the San Diego Air and Space Museum has had more than 90 million views and more than 1 million tags added to their photos.” And, it’s free – up to a terabyte, which is an insanely huge amount of data. Put in terms of photographs, a terabyte is about 30,000 I-phone photographs – maybe even more than that, depending on how big each photograph is, of course. Beyond that, it’s eight bucks a month for unlimited storage. (I subscribe – it comes to about seventy-five dollars US a year.)
Users may protect their data via copyright and use statements, or can make their material available to everyone without restriction. Of course, you have to put your photographs into digital form – to do that, you can scan them or just take the picture with a cell phone or digital camera. Once the file is uploaded, a Flickr user may add a series of key words to each image. “Key Words” are words that describe the image so that an online search engine can find it. (Many search engines don't yet recognize specific images, though some can search for words or phrases in documents). Users may add up to 75 keywords to each image uploaded to Flickr.
Next, the user adds text and links, if desired, to each image or group of images. I do this on my uploaded photographs to increase a viewer's awareness of my Rotary Club's activities, our Rotary interests, and others, which may in turn increase a viewer's interest in learning more about becoming a member of Rotary. I maintain a document (on Google Documents) containing all the standard texts I use, so that I don't have to type the standard text on each photograph. (See the appendix to this article for the standard text I use on nearly every Rotary photograph I put up on Flickr for others to see). Users may establish albums for pictures in much the same way that one maintains hard-copy photo albums. In my case, I have a couple of dozen personal albums.
To increase the visibility of one's documents, users may choose to add them to one or more of the tens of thousands of special interest groups on Flickr. Adding pictures to other interest groups increases the probability that others would see your document or photograph. You may also establish your own interest groups that allow others to add their images as well, perhaps specific to that Rotary activity. It is almost like shooting fish in a barrel. Rotarians are engaged world-wide in a wonderful variety of activities focused on making the world a better place. That activity is and should be of great interest to many millions of people. And, the history behind Rotary is fascinating! We have to get those activities and that history out where people can see it, and, in turn, learn more about Rotary. Many people may well be inspired to check out their local Clubs.
Flickr, like the web, never sleeps. It is there, in use by tens of millions of people, every second of every day. The documents I posted years ago are out there on the web, collecting viewers and informing them about Rotary International and my Club without any further effort on my part. If a Flickr user makes a comment on one of my images, Flickr lets me know about it so that I don't have to actively monitor each image that’s been uploaded.
That, in a nutshell, is how Flickr works. We use it as a “drift net”. We put our activities as Rotarians online and make them publicly accessible so that other potential users to find us. With over 3 billion users online, there’s no doubt there are many who would find our activities as Rotarians of great interest if they only knew about us.
There are many advantages to using any cloud-based database such as Flickr. I'll relate them from my perspective.
My photographs and digital documents are no longer solely reliant on my personal hard drives. I have tens of thousands of photographs. I used to maintain them and back them up annually on a new hard drive – which is roughly about the cost of a year’s membership on Flickr. Obviously, if one of my personal hard drives crashed and became unusable, I would lose all material on that drive. That’s already happened to me, and more than once. “Back in the day”, when we used film cameras, a new picture could be printed from the old negative if the paper or film emulsion was damaged. Once a digital photograph is gone, it is pretty much permanently gone. Those photos are lost forever. True, they can sometimes be recovered, but it’s a laborious and very expensive task. Now, I put all of my important photographs and (suitably password-protected) digitized documents on remote servers ("the cloud"), and have stopped worrying about their loss.
Flickr is easy to use. You'll need a Yahoo account to access Flickr, but that, too, is free. In fifteen minutes you'll be up and online. The only real reason I maintain a Yahoo account is to access Flickr. Once you have a Yahoo account, you can find Flickr online, establish a user name and password, and you're in business.
Flickr is easy to use. You'll need a Yahoo account to access Flickr, but that, too, is free. In fifteen minutes you'll be up and online. The only real reason I maintain a Yahoo account is to access Flickr. Once you have a Yahoo account, you can find Flickr online, establish a user name and password, and you're in business.
Photos can be automatically uploaded, if you desire, to most cloud storage systems such as Flickr or Amazon from your cell phone camera. You do that via the Flickr “app”, or application. Photos and documents can be easily uploaded from your other electronic storage devices – hard drives, in most cases – as well. You can upload as many or as few as you want. (I typically load dozens of photographs at a time). I prefer using my desktop computer or my laptop for managing my Flickr account. Younger members may find using their phone the way to go.
While the material is being uploaded, you can be doing something else on your computer. True, it'll usually run a little more slowly, so many folks upload at night, while they're sleeping.
Most people upload everything and restrict the material to their viewing only (which is labeled “private” on Flickr) until they've had a chance to review the material and decide what kind of visibility they want to allow others to have.
Making the photo public means others can comment on such photos and add to the knowledge base related to that document. I can make my photographs available for download. (They can also be made up into hard copy photo books with a minimum of effort). Or, as I said above, I can keep them all to myself so that no one else, even on a cloud-based system such as Flickr, can see them. (Of course, you can control the commentary, too, and delete those that may not be helpful).
Anyone with access to the web can access your photos to see what Rotarians do. Use of the 75 key words makes it even easier for users searching for those words or phrases to find your photography.
I'd be happy to correspond with other Rotarians to develop ways to improve our online visibility. As I said, I'm not in the employ or in the pay of any of these systems, I am just a satisfied user.
In summary, I think you'll find it more than worth your time and effort to find a cloud-based system you like and use it to get your Club's activities online for others to enjoy. I believe it will be of great benefit to showing off our Clubs and Rotary International to other potential members as well.
A final word of encouragement – it takes much longer to explain this in writing than it does to “just do it”. Hopefully you'll take my suggestion and get started putting your Club's activities on line to show potential new members our activities and interests as Rotarians.
This is the “standard entry” I've developed for nearly every Club photograph I post on Flickr. The standard entry is preceded by an entry describing the action taking place in the photograph.
Rotary is a service organization of local business, professional and civic leaders. We meet regularly, form friendships, and actively seek out opportunities to improve our communities, both locally and across the world.
We welcome everyone interested in working with us to make the world a better place!
As community leaders, Rotarians act responsibly and take action to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems. We provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through our fellowship of business, professional and community leaders.
Rotary is a global organization - there are over 1.2 million Rotarians in nearly every country in the world. There is a Rotary Club in nearly every community of any size in the United States.
Check us out - we welcome everyone interested in working with us to make the world a better place! www.rotary.org
See our club’s website at: http://www.ejcrotary.club/
Join us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/groups/113892888701177/
See us on Flickr at https://www.flickr.com/groups/2812939@N21/
The Rotary Club of East Jefferson County meets weekly at the Tri-Area Community Center at 10 West Valley Road in Chimacum WA. A buffet lunch is available at 11:30am. A brief business meeting, which begins at noon, is followed by a speaker and presentation. The meeting is concluded at 1pm sharp. We are proud to sponsor an Interact group of Rotary-affiliated high school students in Chimacum High School, as well as incoming and outgoing high school exchange students every year.
www.rotary.org
Key words. “Key words” are those words or phrases which identify your photograph. Phrases of more than one word are enclosed in quotes. A person searching on one or more of the key words used on a photo will eventually find that photograph. Here are the standard key words I use for most Rotary pictures loaded to my Club’s Flickr group:
WA Washington "Washington State" "Pacific Northwest" "Olympic Peninsula" "East Jefferson County" Chimacum "Chimacum WA" Quilcine "Quilcine WA" "Port Hadlock" Irondale "Irondale WA" "Port Hadlock WA" "Port Ludlow" "Port Ludlow WA" "East Jefferson County Rotary" "The Rotary Club of East Jefferson County WA" "The Rotary Club of East Jefferson County" "EJC Rotary" Rotary "Rotary District 5020" "District 5020" "Zone 25" Rotary “Rotary International” RI “Service Above Self”