Do we have a Membership crisis or a Leadership crisis?

Article by PDG Andy Rajapakse Assistant Rotary Coordinator

Do we have a Membership crisis or a Leadership crisis?

August Rotary Down Under featured our District 9640’s success of achieving the world’s 25th largest membership growth in 2020-21. Since then, many Rotary leaders from around the world have called me asking how we did it? It’s no secret that effective leadership is the difference between an organization that flourishes and one that fails. It’s the same for Rotary Clubs or Districts. Rotary has no membership crisis. We have a leadership crisis.

What many do not see is the process we developed over 4 years to identify which approach to take in order to make the biggest impact on our declining membership. Four years ago when I was appointed District Membership Chair by Governor Prof. Michael Irving, as a Transformational Leader and an International Marketer, I quickly started to understand our clubs, members, and leaders to analyze where our problems were? Starting innovative agile new Rotary clubs was my solution to declining clubs and members. The last club we had formed was in 2010.

Backed by next Governor Terry Brown, my experiment in 2018 of forming a new styled Rotary Club of Varsity Lakes in the Gold Coast was a success. This created an impact to challenge and bring district leaders together to support starting new clubs. It was not plain sailing. We had few hand breaks. Our Governors Team believed in my capabilities and backed the innovations. In 2019 having been elected Governor Nominee, my focus was to build a team in our district who had the passion and enthusiasm to start new style Rotary Clubs. There was no time to wait for my year as Governor as there was an urgent need for our District to grow to avoid a merger. As a leader, I believe our organization comes first.

This is what made the difference. We built a team of club builders. With a hand-picked team, we created a mindset change across the district to a fundamental transformation. Instead of duplicating our traditional Rotary Club models, we innovated agile lifestyle Rotary Clubs to attract a new generation of our society to Rotary. We created a new product for a new world. As Governor-Elect in February 2020 at my Presidents-Elect Training, I launched the “One Crazy Big Goal Vision” to inspire club Presidents. It was a scary big dream to grow from 1177 to 1400 members by 1st July 2021. A growth never seen in the 40-year history of our district. Fortune favours the brave. The strategy was to bring "one new member a day". My challenge to Assistant Governors was to grow every club by a net +1 and set club goals on rotary.org. I took the challenge to start 5 new clubs.

We attracted 383 new members in 365 days. 32 clubs recorded +1 growth. The district grew by 14.4% net +169 members to reach 1346. That’s 77% of my crazy big goal. A new benchmark in Zone 8. It was no surprise last Rotary year we formed 5 new Rotary Clubs and 2 Satellite Rotary Clubs, 3 Rotaract Clubs, an Interact Club, and a Rotex club as our highly empowered and trained club development team was in peak performance like Olympic athletes. Our 14.4% growth was higher than any district in neighbouring Zone 10A the Philippines with 110 M people. Our 53 clubs grew +57. The 5 new clubs attracted +112. The new clubs gave us exponential growth.

Since 2018 now we have formed 8 new Rotary Clubs from Passport to Corporate to Networking to Environments cause club models and 6 Satellite Rotary clubs that enhanced our growth to make us world champions. The new style Clubs we formed were agile. They embraced a modern lifestyle to engage a new generation of members to thrive in an unpredictable and changing environment of the global pandemic. They embraced modern “Apps” like “WhatsApp” & “Trello” to communicate and focus on their members’ interests and causes. They moved away from outdated “clubrunner” to modern user-friendly “Mailchimp” and many. The new styled clubs are dynamic as the club models are non-hierarchical, open, and inclusive to adapt to rapid change faster than traditional Rotary clubs. Meeting costs are affordable to young people as they meet once a month over wine & cheese or cocktails. They embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. Being technologically savvy and fired by a change mindset these new style Rotary Clubs are better equipped than traditional clubs to embrace Covid19’s radical reset of social norms of sudden lockdowns, state border closures, restrictions of people movement, gatherings, volunteering and fundraising models. The future of Rotary is here!

Our District 9640 has shown membership growth is possible in a developed country. What we need are transformational leaders to create a growth mindset and build teams with the capabilities of forming new clubs. This type of leader comes once in a lifetime. If every Rotary District in Zone 8 can find or train Transformational Leaders, we will have no membership crisis.