Dear Training Leaders
Welcome to the Train the Training Leaders Session on Membership Development
To put it simply, all our membership development initiatives are always response to one question we constantly ask ourselves. “What should Rotary Clubs do to remain a preferred organisation for people to join?”
We set forth an initiative every time we hear a response. It is called the preference parameter. This response is crucial to addressing member’s interest to stay and work with the club.
The internal communication, rewards and recognition programmes of the club play a vital role in attracting and retaining members. What is important to know is that it is benchmarking to the highest standards that will produce the desired results.
With this approach, I am asking you to tell the clubs to treat every single member as a customer. People’s perception is reality and this is true for customer satisfaction.
It is always a moving target, especially in a voluntary service organisation such as Rotary. The club leadership can never say this is the ultimate, as the member will always keep raising the bar.
The key to retention is to make the club leadership realise that they have to benchmark themselves to the highest ethical standards in both delivery and measurement.
They have to constantly deliver reports to the members on how the club and the officials have fared, even if the members have not asked for such metrics.
As a club, the culture of the leaders should be to strive to measure quality of service against a self-benchmarked standard as well as what is seen as the best practices of other clubs.
Developing new members and retaining them depends on the holistic views of the club’s service standards and where the leadership stands against them.
Clubs should be trained to breakdown the membership into service teams so that they can deliver across communities and achieve cross-functional synergy.
This is the key to retention. The service teams must be guided by cross function trained senior leaders from the club or from the talent pool created by the district governor.
Attrition is unavoidable, but the task is to manage attrition. Clubs must have attrition control programmes that address underlying reasons.
Trainers must recommend a slew of initiatives, which should include incentive programmes for members completing a tenure of say 3 years, 5 years and so on.
Most important is the grievance management programmes that need to be in place in every club as reports suggest that clubs break up or members leave the club very often due to internal quarrels and strife.
Getting new members, which is head hunting, is by no means a cakewalk. Good headhunters for the clubs should have a meticulous process in place to track down talented people into Rotar.
Though, it is time consuming, the clubs have to look for people on the basis of certain ‘must-have’ criteria.
Membership Development chairpersons in every club have to be well prepared, on schedule, authentic, sincere, have the ability to build relationships, should be able to convey the values of Rotary and have the best interest of the potential member in mind.
They should help the potential members discover their urge to be a useful member of the community and match it to the club’s profile.
It is said that Rotary works on an ‘extrovert bias.’ But is service all about being gregarious and putting on a show? What about those introverts who embrace solitude, don’t speak often but quietly exhibit their need to serve the community? The new initiatives taken for E Clubs can be the answer to get such people.
Even in regular clubs, we can find such persons. But when more outgoing members are prone to passionately jump up, wave their arms and proclaim grandiose ideas, the quieter ones find it difficult to express even their most ingenious suggestions for a service project.
It is up to the club leadership to devise ways to exploit their creativity and maximise their inherent values.
I wish you a rewarding experience during the sessions and I am confident that with your efforts we will be able to increase the membership substantially during the coming months.