Membership in Service Clubs

Rotary's Experience

Divya Wodon, Naina Wodon, Quentin Wodon

• Editorial: Palgrave Pivot
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137444752
• Categoría: Commerce
• Categoría: Stratégie commerciale

Membership in Service Clubs provides the first rigorous assessment of the activities of Rotary, a global service organization founded in 1905 that implements projects and helps build goodwill and peace throughout the world.

1

Introduction

Abstract: Millions of people are members of service clubs around the world. This book is for them as well as for those—including students, academics, and nonprofit managers—who are interested in how service clubs work, the challenges they face, and the service they provide. The book focuses on Rotary, the oldest of the service club organizations, but it should be relevant for other service clubs as well. The book considers seven questions: What is the membership challenge faced by service clubs? Who are their members, why did they join, and how satisfied are they with their experience? How can districts identify geographic areas for growth? How can clubs innovate to attract and retain members? To what extent are clubs and districts involved in service? What types of projects are clubs involved in, and what makes them successful? And finally how can districts organize successful conferences?

Keywords: Kiwanis club; Lions club; Rotary club; Rotary district; Rotary International; service club

Wodon, Divya, Naina Wodon, and Quentin Wodon. Rotary’s Experience: Membership in Service Clubs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137444752.0004.

Millions of people are members of service clubs around the world. This book is for them as well as for those—including students, academics, and nonprofit managers—who are interested in how service clubs work, the challenges they face, and the service they provide. The book focuses on Rotary, the oldest of the service club organizations, but it should be relevant for other service clubs as well. Founded in 1905 Rotary has today 1.2 million members organized in 34,000 clubs and more than 500 districts located in more than 200 countries and territories.

While there is a wealth of information on the history of service clubs including that of Rotary,¹ little systematic information is available on the challenges service clubs face, their membership, and how clubs can succeed. There is an especially surprising lack of detailed and robust empirical studies published on service clubs in peer-reviewed journals and book series. This is the case not only for Rotary, but also for other service club organizations such as Kiwanis and Lions. This book aims to fill part of that void. While the book relies at times on anecdotal and case study evidence, it is based for the most part on solid and systematic survey data collection conducted principally for Rotary district 7620.² Although the data used in the book refer to that district and more generally to the East Coast of the United States, the book should also be relevant to all Rotarians and those interested in service clubs elsewhere in the world.

The book considers seven questions: What is the membership challenge faced by service clubs? Who are their members, why did they join, and how satisfied are they with their experience? How can districts identify geographic areas for growth? How can clubs innovate to attract and retain members? To what extent are clubs and districts involved in service? What types of projects are clubs involved in, and what makes them successful? And finally how can districts organize successful conferences? One chapter is devoted to each of those questions except for the last question to which two chapters are devoted. The book is organized more generally in four parts and related topics: (I) Understanding the Challenge; (II) Growing the Membership; (III) Assessing and Celebrating Service; and (IV) Serving the Membership.

After this Introduction, Chapter 2 considers the membership challenge faced by service clubs. These clubs have a long and illustrious history, but their membership has been declining in the past few decades in North America. In order to understand the challenges faced by clubs, after a brief history of their development, the chapter assesses the extent of this decline (which is milder than often assumed) and the reasons that could explain it. In doing so, the chapter sets the stage for the more detailed analysis provided in subsequent chapters.

In order to grow, clubs and districts need to assess their strengths and areas for improvements. They need to understand who their members are, why they joined, and why they stay. The vitality of clubs depends on their ability to engage members with different interests, so that the whole is larger than the sum of the parts. But to do so, an assessment of how clubs are doing is needed. Chapter 3 shows how this can be done and what can be learned from the exercise by summarizing the results of a membership survey conducted for district 7620.

Service clubs, in general, face a membership challenge, but at the same time Rotarians are broadly satisfied with their Rotary experience. This suggests that if clubs and districts could articulate their value proposition, they should be able to grow. By how much could they grow and what would be the geographic areas that could be targeted for growth by districts? This is a complex question for which there is no simple or single answer. Chapter 4 provides an indicative answer using one specific approach. The idea is to measure the relative potential for membership growth in different geographic areas through simple simulations techniques. The analysis is conducted for Rotary zone 33 which covers part of the Mid- and South Atlantic regions of the United States.

How can clubs innovate to attract and retain members? Chapter 5 provides a partial answer to this question first by considering some of the priorities of Rotary’s North American Membership Strategic Plan as well as a number of pilot programs. Beyond these programs, the growth in membership ultimately will depend on the commitment of current Rotarians and clubs and the creativity with which they recruit new members. The chapter describes a few interesting membership initiatives that clubs have undertaken in district 7620, as well as the strategic plan of the district. How to create new clubs without weakening existing clubs is also briefly discussed.

The main reason for the existence of service clubs is the service they provide. Yet many clubs and districts do not actually know the extent of their service work. Clubs and districts are aware of their main projects and they also recognize that many members spend long hours in service to their club or district. But they do not know the total number of hours spent by Rotarians in service work, or even in some cases the financial contributions made by Rotarians to Rotary causes and projects through various channels. Having a better understanding of the extent of the service they provide can help clubs to better plan and communicate their work. Chapter 6 shows how membership surveys and other techniques can be used to measure the extent of the service work of clubs and districts, which is extensive.

The ultimate measure of a club’s service contribution is the impact of its activities. Assessing such impact typically requires detailed analysis, and a good idea of what the counterfactual might have been without a club’s involvement. Unfortunately, such data are rarely available to Rotarians. But in some cases, data are available. Chapter 7 provides examples of Rotary projects from district 7620 that have arguably been successes and analyses why this has been the case. The chapter also provides examples of involvement by Rotarians in many different types of projects to illustrate the great diversity and richness of the projects being implemented.

Chapter 8 and 9 are devoted to the evaluation of district conferences. These are annual events to which Rotarians from one or more districts are invited to participate. The conferences are important because they represent the main annual event where Rotarians from different clubs belonging to a common geographic area can meet each other and exchange their experiences. District-level Rotary business is also conducted at the conferences, and the conferences are an occasion to hear from Rotary International officials and other speakers. The conferences typically combine fun and learning, but they are rarely evaluated seriously. The two chapters present quantitative and qualitative results of the evaluation of the last two conferences implemented by district 7620, in each case jointly with one or two other districts. The focus is on the satisfaction of participants, what they appreciate the most, and what they would like to see.

Finally, Chapter 10 wraps up with brief concluding remarks.

This is on purpose a relatively short book. Rotarians and members of other service clubs are busy people—they may not read a treatise! Many more topics could have been considered for inclusion in the book and some of the topics that are included are dealt with only in a very limited way. For example, the question of what makes a service project successful and sustainable, and how to process international projects through the Rotary administration would warrant a study in and by itself. These and other topics could be considered for future research and publications.

If there is one message that runs throughout the book, it is the following. Rotary remains strong today, but clubs and districts need to better understand what their product or value proposition is, and who or what they are competing against for the scarce and valuable time and resources of their (actual and potential) membership. While serious and systematic empirical analysis will clearly not by itself enable clubs and districts to grow and prosper, it can help. It is hoped that this book will prove useful to readers and that it will encourage others—Rotarians but also members of other service clubs as well as academics—to undertake similar analyses in order to inform the work of service clubs and make a difference for the less fortunate.

Notes

  1   See, for example, Walsh (1979), Forward (2003) and Carvin (2011) for Rotary, and Martin (1991) and Martin and Kleinfelder (2008) for Lions, as well as Charles (1993) more generally. A few PhD dissertations have also been written on Rotary (e.g. Bahlke, 1956, and more recently Crichton, 2008 and Goff, 2008), but again often with an emphasis on history. Several of the (few) academic journal articles on Rotary also deal with history—one example is Sugiura (1986).

  2   The district has a long history. The oldest club in the district as its boundaries stand today is the Rotary club of Baltimore which was chartered as the 48th Rotary club on January 3, 1912. Soon thereafter, Paul Harris sponsored the creation of the Rotary club of Washington, DC, which was chartered on July 11, 1912. When districts were created in 1915, both clubs were placed in district 3 which covered Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. Today district 7620 covers part of Maryland and the District of Columbia where Washington, DC, the capital city of the United States, is located.

Part I

Understanding the Challenge

2

What Is the Membership Challenge Faced by Clubs?

Abstract: This chapter considers the membership challenge faced by service clubs. These clubs have a long and illustrious history, but their membership has been declining in the past few decades in North America. In order to understand the challenges faced by clubs, after a brief history of their development, the chapter assesses the extent of this decline (which is milder than often assumed) and the reasons that could explain it. In doing so, the chapter sets the stage for the more detailed analysis provided in subsequent chapters.

Keywords: civic engagement; community engagement; Kiwanis club; Lions club; Rotary club; Rotary district; Rotary International; service club, membership

Wodon, Divya, Naina Wodon, and Quentin Wodon. Rotary’s Experience: Membership in Service Clubs. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137444752.0006.

Service clubs have a long and illustrious history in the United States, but their membership has been declining in the past few decades. In a New York Times article published more than twenty years ago, Ginsburg (1992) already noted that while service clubs used to attract business as well as professional and community leaders, for some their most crucial project was simply to survive! This was too stark a way to put it as many clubs have survived and some have prospered. In Rotary, the decline in membership in the United States started only in the past two decades, and it has been less pronounced than often believed. Still, the decline is real and it cannot be ignored. The objective of this chapter is to provide a brief history of service clubs, assess the extent of the recent decline in membership, and discuss some of the reasons that could explain it. In doing so, the chapter sets the stage for the more detailed analysis provided in subsequent chapters.

What are service clubs and what is their history?

Service clubs are voluntary nonprofit organizations whose members meet regularly not only for the purpose of engaging in service or charitable work, but also in part for networking purposes and the benefits of fellowship. Some of the largest and best known service club organizations are Rotary International, Lions Clubs International, and Kiwanis International. Rotary’s motto is Service above Self, while Lions’ is We Serve, and Kiwanis’ is Serving the Children of the World. Service clubs do not advocate any specific ideology, nor do they engage in political activity. In the United States, the clubs typically have a 501c(4) status with the Internal Revenue Service, but many clubs also have an associated small charitable foundation which would have a tax exempt 501(c)(3) status and to which club members may donate. The organizations also have international foundations, with the Rotary (International) Foundation being the largest one.¹ Note that service clubs are not related to the notion of service as used, for example, in the military, but many service clubs do have programs among others for veterans.

Rotary, Lions, and Kiwanis were all created at the turn of the century. This was an area of fundamental changes in the United States due to rapid urbanization, industrialization, as well as immigration. Americans had to move across the country to find employment, and this challenged traditional forms of social capital based on relationships with families and childhood friends. The rise of service clubs and other organizations created at the same time such as the Boy Scouts, the Knights of Columbus, the Red Cross, and the Urban League helped to foster stronger links in communities and new relationships that could replace some of the lost ones. In the case of service clubs, which started as business networking clubs and continued to serve that purpose, the organizations also helped to foster much needed trust among local businessmen.

The first service club was the Rotary club of Chicago, which was created in 1905 by Paul Harris (for basic information on Rotary, see, for example, Dochterman, 1999). The choice of the name Rotary came from the fact that the original members decided to rotate the location of their meetings between their various offices. Today, Rotary International has 1.2 million members in 34,000 clubs located in more than 200 countries and geographic a...