A Rotary tabloid that impressed the community
As Rotarians, we are a network of inspired individuals who translate our passions into relevant social causes to change lives in local and international communities.
We provide service to others, promote integrity, and advance world understanding, goodwill, and peace through our fellowship of business, professional, and community leaders.
We are the backbone of our city and district, we care about our people and we make a difference. Why are we successful? What makes us stand out from the crowd? Through the five Rotary Clubs in Rotorua, what have we achieved locally and internationally?
These were the questions we wanted answered to inform the people of Rotorua of what the five Rotary Clubs have done in Rotorua in the past, the present and what future plans we have that will benefit the local community.
We are all very good at getting on with the project or task in hand. However, we are not so good at telling our success stories and how we make a difference! So some means needed to be found ... and was.
In May this year Sue Gunn, a member of Rotary Rotorua Sunrise and District 9930 PR & Image Committee got an idea that the five Rotary Clubs in Rotorua could club together to profile the success of Rotary in Rotorua to raise awareness of Rotary in the community and to work up a membership recruitment drive.
That led to meeting with the Advertising Manager of the Rotorua Daily Post, Janine Davy a new member of the Rotary Club of Rotorua North to look at producing a tabloid in the newspaper with a web version for uploading to all club websites.
We met with the five club presidents and the Assistant Governor, Richard Evans to sell the idea and gauge their support. They were all very enthusiastic and so the Rotary Community tabloid was born.
The 12 page tabloid was inserted into the Rotorua Daily Post on 27 September, circulated to 24,500 homes and 1,000 extra copies were given out to the five clubs. These copies were used by clubs to expand their publicity to those in their immediate network and to local business outlets and contributed along with the wider distribution to a considerable rise in interest and enquiry about their clubs.
This initiative was a great example of Rotary working together for the benefit of their community, for the recruitment of new members and in telling our great stories highlighting our local and international collaborations, successful fundraisers and humanitarian projects.
All the editorial articles were funded by Rotarians and friends who advertised their businesses and/or products and services in the tabloid. For every half page of advertising, the Rotorua Daily Post gave us a half page of editorial. Plus, we had a dedicated journalist work along side Sue Gunn to contact and write up all the articles.
As Sue Gunn says, "it was a great team effort with many members from the five clubs contributing articles and images, and the District Chairs contributing articles, including Raewyn Kirkman contributing The Rotary Foundation article. Plus we had the endorsement of DG Keith Owens welcome and introduce the Rotary stories."
Richard Evans, AG was amazed at the positive feedback from clubs, friends of Rotary and readers of the Daily Post. While the tabloid was about celebrating the considerable successes of the clubs, it was also about generating some new members and it is resulting in an increase in membership enquiries and Rotary Rotorua Sunrise has had a prospective new member attend two meetings and keen to join!
The tabloid is on-line at: http://issuu.com/apn_mediaservices/docs/rotary?mode=wondow and on the District 9930 website at www.rotary9930.org
The five Rotorua clubs have worked hard to develop a strong cooperative and collaborative relationship as they believe that this boosts their effectiveness in the community. Rather than ‘competing’ for resource and presence in the community they meet regularly to plan activity they can do together. Examples are periodic joint club meetings including a very enjoyable and well attended District Governors visit meeting. Other initiatives are the a joint fundraising dinner and developing publicity resources such as flags and banners that can be shared among all the clubs because they are banded ‘Rotary Clubs of Rotorua’ rather than for an individual club. For the Rotarians themselves the initiative has expanded their network of friends and as a consequence strengthened the commitment to and engagement in Rotary.