The membership experience for me is all about how I think and feel at our Rotary weekly meetings, our district events, projects, and conferences. Experience is subjective and it is mine, yours may be something completely different.

Article by PDG Debbie Loveday, Assistant Rotary Coordinator

At the beginning of this Rotary year someone said,” If you were invited to join your Rotary club, would you” Hmm, now there’s a very thought provoking question. It raised lots of conflicts for me. I like the people and have had lots of fun with projects. I didn’t like the image we projected. An image that appeared to be a group of mature aged people sitting down for dinner. The dinner wasn’t even that good, but we had always done it that way and it had never changed. A year ago, if I was a prospective Rotarian, then no I probably wouldn’t have joined my club. I wanted to be apart of an exciting, vibrant club, where being a Rotarian was something, people aspired to being. I wanted to talk about projects and not what was for dinner. I wanted to sit down with likeminded people and concentrate on what was needed in our community and beyond.

I started looking at what other clubs were doing. Seeing how some of the new clubs were attracting new members. These clubs didn’t look like a traditional Rotary Clubs. They were different. Different meetings times and formats. Different venues. Lots had discarded the traditional formats of Sergeant's fines, and cents on the table. Saying grace and singing the National anthem. I wanted to spend my evening planning or positioning our club to do good in our community.

Change doesn’t come easily, you have to work at it. Finding a common goal and working towards achieving it can take time. Time communicating with all the other members to see what experience they wanted, and how it could be implemented. Everything by agreement, taking all the members along for the ride. The goal being change for the better, change to create a more attractive vibrant club that others wanted to join. Retaining our membership base and not let them slip out the back door. In other words Make Membership Memorable for the right reasons.

At a recent conference the RIPPR (Rotary International President's Personal Representative) talked about how we might be guilty of over selling ourselves and under delivering on expectation. I can honestly say that I get quite passionate about the things I am involved with and expect you are the same. However, unless we can deliver on that expectation once new members have signed on the dotted line then we may well lose them out that revolving back door in a year or two. This brings me to that adage of every member having a role or responsibility, being included, and having something to contribute. Caused based focus groups is where I found myself. If I could get 15 or more new members, why would I start a new club? I would want to strengthen my own club, protect its future, and increase the diversity of people, projects, and activities. The new members would immediately have something to contribute to under the guidance of more experienced Rotarians who could mentor and help with implementation.

A year on, there is still more to do. Implementing change is great but unless we review and re-evaluate that change on a regular basis then it could fall apart. Surveys, analysis of results, getting members to participate and share their thoughts on what has worked for them is the way to go. It’s all part of that Membership Experience.

A year on if someone asked me whether as a prospective Rotarian I would join my club, the answer would be yes. A big yes to being evolutionary and even revolutionary as Paul Harris once said.