Secret Sauce for Triple Digit Membership Growth
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By Debi Bush, D5450 Membership Chair, (Denver Cherry Creek), membership@rotary5450.org
Club President Mike Daniels of Broomfield Crossing Rotary has some insights and best practices that are working in a big way!
There was an enormous uptick in membership numbers which made me track down Mike Daniels, to learn what their secret sauce has been for doubling their numbers from 11 to 22 and growing each month.
Message from Mike:
As for our club's growth, I would say that these items were among the key factors:
1) I began my term by sending a questionnaire to my membership asking what directions we should pursue in my term: what size of a club we should be targeting, how we might change the format of our meetings, what speakers we should invite, etc. It sounds somewhat like the visioning process you conduct and I wish I had known about that beforehand! :)
2) We lowered our dues and placed emphasis on club service over monetary efforts and donations. We changed our club meeting location from the Omni Interlocken hotel, with breakfast included in the fees, to a local pizza restaurant owned by our past President. Due to the fact that we no longer had to pay for a minimum number of meals, this reduced our dues by more than 50% (from $215/quarter to $80/quarter) and instead gave members the option to purchase a breakfast pizza for our 7:10AM meetings if they so desired.
3) Long-time members in our club have been aggressive about inviting new members. The pizza restaurant, for example, has a very large Rotary International sign on its door and another sign stating that "The Broomfield Crossing Rotary Club meets here Tuesdays at 7:10AM". Workers at the pizza restaurant, including the manager who is also a member of our club, promote involvement in Rotary to their customers. Each of our longstanding members has invited one or two visitors over the past year. We make a special effort to be welcoming to visitors and ask if we can include them on our future emails announcing upcoming events and meetings. We do our best to try to get them to feel a part of our club from the first time they visit. We created a "Club Visitor's Guide" (attached) so that visitors know how our meetings proceed and also put a link to this on our web page. Once they become members, we engage them in volunteer efforts right away and use a red badge program to help provide incentives for club involvement.
4) We have placed more emphasis on outreach such as a Facebook page with photos of speakers and other events as well as articles on our web site. We created a one page brochure telling visitors about the main volunteer and fundraising efforts we are involved in throughout the year (see attached). We submit articles to the local newspaper informing the
community about our service projects.
5) Finally, we started a "5th Tuesday of the Month" party. This is a purely social event that takes the place of our regular meeting. We have invited prospective members to these parties as an informal way to get to know us. I've attached a picture from the Halloween party we held last fall.
As a next step in membership, I would like to enhance diversity in our club. I feel that we have a fairly good ratio of women to men, but we want to target a more diverse group including younger professionals and the Hispanic and Asian communities in our town. We have recently added a new board position for our club, a membership chair, to help with this.
The credit to our growth goes to the great work of our club's Past Presidents, Board Members and current membership!
Check out the Broomfield Crossing Rotary Club newsletter broadcasting their activities and events.
