Sunrise Bulletin Vol 33 Issue 17 (Oct 22, 2018)

Marty and Paul’s presentation followed up on Dave McDonald’s talk the previous week on the issue of revitalizing Membership in Rotary clubs. Across North America, membership has declined 18% since 1995. Sunrise’s membership mirrors this; we have declined 12% since 2010. Diversity is another key issue in which Rotary needs to make better progress. While women are making gains in membership, Rotary’s membership still does not accurately reflect the overall population. Sunrise Rotary’s ethnic diversity is slow to improve and there are ways we can do better. Our club’s average age has increased from 54 years to 64 years over the last 12 years; where will we be in 5 years? 10 years?

What are we going to do about it? The Sonoma club is an excellent example of how to do it right. They went from 48 to 100 members in 6 years! They have excellent speakers every week. They put their club’s calendars on every table every week so members are informed. They are extremely proactive in attracting members and their membership now includes key civic leaders and other fully engaged community members.

Rotary International has studied the issue of declining enrollment in depth. RI’s program addressing the issue is called “Be a Vibrant Club.” The way to improve membership, as shown by case studies addressed in the report, is to make our meetings more interesting and relevant to a wider and more diverse population, increase service projects and attendance at those projects, and increase engagement by all members, among many other things. We need projects that touch people’s hearts. For example, in Sonoma they actively recruit non-members to engage in their service projects.

We have been tracking the number of guests attending our meetings since July 2017. Since that time, we’ve hosted 36 invited guests, less than one guest per two members per year. Some of the things we need to do to increase membership (including the key aspect of retention of existing members) include: high energy meetings, publicize speakers and upcoming programs, use of table-top calendars, include regular programs about our activities, engage existing members to give occasional craft talks, and make sure that all members are “on deck” to thank guests for coming.

We broke into groups for table discussions and came up with some interesting results. One key result: we love our club and want it to remain viable and active. Points that received the most support:

Establish a committee to focus on having excellent speakers. Several members offered to be part of this.

There was support for having a service event replace a meeting periodically, although there were mixed desires of doing this once per month or once per quarter.
Likewise, replacing one meeting with a social activity either once per month or per quarter.
Periodically have a program focused on sharing details of some of our service projects, and make a special effort to invite guests interested in service.

Many thanks to Marty and Paul for the great presentation of these issues. We’ll be hearing more from them in the next few weeks regarding these important membership issues.