SR-2017 Setup

This event was meant to be one of 4 spread throughout the district to give Clubs some momentum going into the next Rotary year.  The 4 were spread out so that each covered 14-15 clubs that could all easily get to the meeting and the social and home again on the same day.  The goal is to attract a wide range of leaders from each club, from 5-15 participants per club covering executive, admin, and other enthusiastic members from a broad spectrum.  With an “ideal” attendance of 200 (ish) per event, schools or churches were selected with enough room for common opening meeting and multiple breakout areas.  The IDEAL setting is a large room where ALL breakouts are in the same space, with chairs pulled into circles or around tables.  The common buzz of multiple disjointed discussions is part of what makes it work so well!

 

Our “test” run this year had only 32 participants, primarily because of late organization.  More than ½ the clubs in the target area had spring events already planned for the same weekend, and to be successful this type of operation needs early planning and marketing (start promoting in the early fall for Spring event).

 

The first hour was a guided introduction to the day (see “Roundup 2017 Presentation” PPT file), followed by facilitated organization of topics.  The day was introduced with the Goal and “The Big Question” as the underlying theme:

 

Collect “Best Practices” & Prioritize.

 

What best practices, techniques or action items will help our Rotary Club to become better in 2017-2018 than it is right now?

 

With 2 recording on flipcharts (because we had 2 breakout periods scheduled) a facilitator guided the group into suggesting good topics for breakout discussions.  The goal was 4 topics per breakout session, this number determined only that morning when final attendance was known (with 100 participants we may have picked 10 breakout topics).  When each list had ~double (i.e. 8) suggestions the facilitator called a hand-vote… each participant could vote for 4 on each list.  That defined the breakout sessions for each period (breakout A and B).  The room already had the numbers 1-4 posted in different areas, and chairs/tables were quickly assembled into the 4 zones.

 

From 11:00-1:00 that day we ran the 2 breakouts for ~35 minutes each… longer takes some of the urgency and momentum out of the day.  In between we had a light lunch (see “$100 Challenge” notes below), and in each breakout the facilitator would guide the group into discussing their topic (allowing that it was OK to digress into other useful topics!) and collect “Best Practices” by writing each on a separate piece of paper.  After each breakout all Best Practices were taped up on a blank wall, and our experience was an average of 5-6 per session resulted (just over 40 total for 2 breakout periods of 4 topics each).

 

The final session (from 1:00-2:00pm) was for participants to “Shop the Room”… each were given a number of voting dots (we chose 18 per), and instructed to vote for their favorite Best Practices.  They could vote for almost ½ of all shown, or could emphasize a few of their favorites with multiple dots… no rules.

 

The Summerland Rotary Club was the local host, organizing the venue, the lunch, and the social following the OST.  Participants were encouraged to invite spouses and children to join for the social, and a few did.  Past President Roch Fortin took the lead in organization, and offered a local group of high-school students whom they had sponsored with a “$100 Challenge”.  The club has given these students $100 to help create fund-raising programs that they can apply to their chosen needs.  This group (of 4 students) has challenged themselves to raise $3000, they provided lunch (with donated food they arranged from local businesses), they ran a car-wash for folks during the breaks, and they organized a “by donation” BBQ at the Saxon Winery where we gathered after the OST.  I believe the raised close to $2000 on the day!

 

With ~16 topics on the two flip-charts breakouts selected were as follows: