By Scott Farrenkopf, Executive Assistant Governor, Region 2
Can You Get Service when There is No One to Serve?
How many of you have been to a restaurant and waited and waited for your food as your stomach growled and your patience wore thin wondering where is your waitress or waiter? Guess what? If you had no server then you would never be served! Without people (ie. the server) then the restaurant would cease to exist.
The restaurant is just like Rotary. It serves. The waitress/waiter is just like a Rotarian. It delivers the service (a server). The client is just like the beneficiary. It needs served. Hence, what we as Rotarians must realize is that there is no “Service above Self” without the Rotarian! There is no action without the “Rotarian of Action!”
So if you wondered why Rotary keeps “membership growth and retention” as a hot ongoing topic of discussion, it should no longer be a subject of wonder. Rotary will cease to exist and beneficiaries will suffer without Rotarians.
What continues to amaze me is why we cannot have a net growth when Rotary is such an unbelievable organization with such an amazing group of Rotarians. We Rotarians know this but new potential Rotarians do not unless we take action. We must recognize who might be a great Rotarian that is around us and we must make the ask!
The question is, “Why is every Rotarian not identifying just one high potential great new Rotarian each year and making the ask?”
Let me summarize with some simple math. We have about 3200 Rotarians in District 5240. If every District 5240 Rotarian asked one applicable candidate to a Rotary meeting and followed up to make the ask: “How would you like to become a member?,” then we would have 3200 potential new Rotarians. Now let’s assume only 33% accepted and joined. We would have still grown by +1000 new members!!! District 5240 would have gone from 3200 Rotarians to 4200 Rotarians in one year! This, of course, assumes there is no retention loss which I will discuss in another article. Guess what? District Governor Savi Bhim’s net District 5240 membership growth target goal of +1000 is really not all that crazy or impossible to achieve. What the mind believes, it achieves!
So each of you needs to ask yourself, first “Why can’t I ask just one person who I know that would make a great Rotarian to a meeting?” and second “Would you like to join our Rotary club?” If not then what is preventing you? You surely love Rotary enough to insure its continued existence! You have the heart of Rotary. So be a “Rotarian of Action” and commit to do so!