Membership is Major Challenge for Rotary International
Posted by John Borst
on Jan 25, 2011
2552 new clubs over 8 years results in 226 net membership increase for RI
RI Director John C. Smarge, in an address to the governors-elect, in San Diego, spotlighted one of Rotary's greatest challenges when he said, "Since 2003, we have added 2,552 Rotary clubs yet only increased our overall membership by 226 members."Smarge encouraged Rotary leaders to strengthen clubs by branding Rotary as the organization of choice for business, professional, and community leaders throughout the world.
Joseph H. Jones, governor-elect of District 6220 (parts of Michigan and Wisconsin, USA), found Smarge's address inspiring. and said "Everyone is talking about how we need to grow membership. I'm going to focus on retention." Jones, plans to use Facebook and YouTube to keep club members engaged and excited about Rotary.
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As a member of the District Communications team, I am going to stick my neck out for the first time and provide an editorial on this situation, which is somewhat akin to what one might do on a blog post. If you wish to add a comment as well, send it to jborst@drytel.net and I will add your reply to this post.
Smarge's data, retrived from (Joseph Derr, Rotary International News - 24 January 2011. Courtesy: eFlash_Rotary) is certainly revealling of the state of Rotary Interantional.
Converted into annual terms and put coloqually RI is growing in clubs at a faster rate than members. This is certainly the inverse of what one would expect. On average, each year for the past 8 years, RI has created 319 additional clubs and gained only 28 additional members. With 1,200,000 members world wide, that is a growth rate of just .002% or in practical terms stagnation.
I'm not sure Director John Smarge's suggestion is very helpful. In my experience Rotary is already branded "as the organization of choice for business, professional, and community leaders throughout the world."
What the data does demonstrate, and Jones gets much closer to the painful truth, is we have a "Retention" problem. Assuming each new club averages 25 new members in one year, then annually, 319 clubs would add about 8000 new members. Since we only had a net annual increase of 28 members we are, to put it simply, loosing members as fast as we gain them.
One way of reversing this situation is to put an emphasis on retention as well as new recruiting.
Since Rotary International is so large, we must also research what is happening within District 5550. Do we mirror this trend? We should know.
I doubt, given our demographic, we are adding clubs within District 5550. If we were losing members at the rate of RI globally we would be closing down clubs in a way we would notice. But we don't appear to be doing that either. It does appear that District 5550 has a retention rate which is possibly well above our international situation. Maybe if we studied what we are doing, we would have information we can share with RI to strenghten the whole organization.
Perhaps that is one way, we in District 5550 could embrace RI President-elect Kalyan Banerjee's 2011-12 Rotary Theme "Reach Within to Embrace Humanity"; in other words, lets start with embracing the human family that is Rotary.
John A. Borst