By Victor H. Caballero, past governor of District 4100 (Mexico)
Your district membership has been declining and you want to reverse the trend. But you aren’t sure what to do. The first and best action you can take is to come up with a district membership plan.
My district was facing just such a membership decline. At the end of the 2020-21 year, we had dropped to our lowest point since 2014-15. Knowing we could do better, I set out in 2022-23 to create an action plan to increase membership. My goal was to achieve our highest membership total in five years.
It was a lot of work, but by the end of the year, we saw the fruits of our labor. From 1 July 2022 to 1 July 2023, we had a growth from 1,098 members to 1,305. That’s 207 new members, which went along with a net increase of five new clubs.
There were a number of components to our action plan. But my key advice to districts would be to:
- Hold all your training seminars early, within the first three months of the Rotary year.
- Have governors visit all the clubs in your district during the first half of the Rotary year. That way, you can spend the second half of the year following up on agreements and commitments you made with each club.
- Challenge each club president to make membership growth a priority. Have them commit to leaving the club stronger than they found it. In terms of membership, that means that if the club had 30 members when they began, pass the leadership to the next president with at least 31 members.
- Share club statistics with each club and help them use those to set obtainable goals. I discovered that a majority of presidents didn’t even know the statistics about their club. I used an analysis of the club’s statistics over the previous five years to guide them toward goals they could achieve. I emphasized that the point was not to compete with other clubs but to improve the performance of their own club.
- Lead by example. Ask each club president to invite a new member, and by so doing, set an example for other members of their club.
- Don’t be afraid to terminate members who are no longer meeting their commitments or obligations to the club. But first exhaust all resources to keep them. By removing members who were no longer contributing, we were able to create a better environment in some of our clubs. We also challenged presidents to replace every member who had withdrawn by bringing in a new member.
- Involve all members of the club in service projects. It is very important for club presidents to get their members engaged in service in order to maintain and renew their enthusiasm.
In addition to the above, we set out to recover clubs in places that had lost them. We reached out to current and former Rotarians in cities where there had previously been a club and offered to help them restart the club, either as a full club or a satellite. We managed to recover five clubs, convert one satellite club into a full club, and form nine new satellite clubs.
We invited more women to join, starting, if possible, with the spouses of our current members. We encouraged them to form a satellite club if they couldn’t attend the main club, and to invite many of their friends. In this way, we were able to launch our nine new satellite clubs, with a strong representation of women in each.
We also constantly monitored the progress of each club. Membership declines are typical in December and June, but I made a point to communicate our membership goals and where we stood with clubs every month to keep them motivated. If I learned that a club had lost a member, I asked them the same day if they had any membership prospects. I arranged to meet with business leaders and professionals in their community to tell them about our organization and interest them in Rotary. We were able to replace a good number of the members who for various reasons left and keep adding more members than we lost.
Having a district membership plan, committing to it early, and constantly monitoring it throughout the year is the key to increasing membership and building stronger clubs. What is your district membership plan? Share it in the comments section below.
https://blog.rotary.org/2024/01/25/district-membership-plans-a-key-to-membership-growth/