For the past 18 months, in the lead up to June 30th 2017, I was the Public Image Committee Chair for Rotary District 9790. I loved being Public Image Chair. It was great being the Public Image chair because I got to speak to a lot of different Rotary Clubs and find out about a lot of the great projects going on in the community – it’s amazing what these Clubs have achieved and are achieving.
The problem that many of these Clubs have is that they aren’t very good at telling people about their projects. Rotary in many ways is the World’s best kept secret. Clubs aren’t always great at promoting themselves but, instead of strategic thinking – they often think a Facebook Page, website or similar individual tactic is all they need to solve their promotional woes. They want to believe that there is some sort of “Silver Bullet” to fix their Public Image – their marketing and public relations problems. Unfortunately it’s not quite that simple.
Marketing your Rotary Club is similar to marketing a business – just generally with a slimmer budget. I wanted to talk about the 5 key points that you have to think about. Before you jump into Facebook, before you build a website – you need to answer these questions.
What are your Club’s goals – Before you jump into anything you first need to decide as a Club what it is that you want to achieve as part of your Marketing and PR activities – these goals will generally fall in one of three areas – more members and supporters, more money from fundraising or more support for projects
What is your strategy – Strategy is an overarching plan to achieve your goals. There’s a lot of detail to cover here that I won’t have time to go into in one blog post but it’s definitely up for discussion in future posts. Are you going with a strategy that targets individuals? Are you targeting key groups or areas? For example, my own Rotary Club is looking at a particular business development in our area to see if there are opportunities to grow our membership through those that are working in this new business precinct.
What tactics will you implement – Only after discussing your Goals and your Strategy would you then look at which tactics will help you achieve your Goals. Does your club need a website? Does your club need a Facebook page? What are you going to put on your website and Facebook page? Would it be better for you to get some brochures printed or an ad in the local newspaper? For some rural based clubs, getting on a local radio maybe an option, getting on local television may be an option. This is not necessarily always an option in metropolitan areas. There are tens of thousands of tactics that you could implement to grow your club and to grow your fundraising – again this is not something I can cover completely here but you only should think about your tactics after you work out what it is that your Club actually wants to achieve and what strategy you are going to implement to try to do so.
How much money do you have to spend – Successful marketing and public relations does cost money. It doesn’t have to be a huge amount of money. You might want to spend some money on Facebook ads to target key demographics in your area that you think would make good members of your club. You might want to spend some money on an ad in the paper or magazine
Who is responsible for implementation and tracking results – You need to make sure that you have someone responsible for your marketing and public relations. Who’s going to take the photos that you need to put up on your website or Facebook page? Who’s going to design your brochures? Who’s going to update your Facebook page and website? How are you going to track your results?
If you don’t know what your goals are you won’t know if any of the tactics that you have implemented have been done so successfully.
Every club does need to get better at marketing themselves. Every club has room for improvement. Please fill in your details below if you are interested in being kept up to date every time I write a new article.