Every Rotary year gives us an opportunity to celebrate what our Clubs and District are doing to increase their impact and create lasting change. There's lots to celebrate so let's take a look back to 2022-2023 and take in some of the highlights of a year full of imagination!
We’ve started the process of refreshing our website including some updated graphics and a homepage layout. Story Submission Guidlines with consistent structure were in place all year and contributed to the user experience of the site and the readership of our bulletin (more on that later). These guidelines make regular story sharing on the website and in the monthly Dispatch much more efficient. We’re driving traffic to the website via social media, communications, club presentations, etc. - it’s becoming a reliable resource. Additional refresh work will be complete in the early part of the 2023-2024 Rotary Year and will include cleaner navigation, more visual enhancements, publishing standards for consistency and best practices to keep the site beautiful and functional. Last year we saw a 35% increase in pageviews - Year over Year. This means more pageviews, more people getting information, resources, ideas, reading stories, etc. and taking it to their clubs or inspiring action.
District Dispatch readership was up over 15% from an average monthly open rate of 37.1% to 52.8%. For some context: A good open rate for a membership organization is 17-28%, so this is a great resource for storytelling and information sharing. Thank you to everyone who contributed to it and helps bring it together each month.
In September we surveyed District Members to get a sense of the support members felt from the District and to get some baseline measurements for some of our goals like awareness of diversity efforts, Rotary and District knowledge, and some of those key metrics on our Dashboard. 336 members responded. If you missed them when we shared them last year, check out this story for a summary of the results: https://rotary6250.org/Stories/2022-member-survey-results
New to our District last year was the Polio Plus Society. Many thanks to Kathy Reinolt, our District Polio Plus Committee co-chair from the Holmen Club for getting this recognition program up and running (and as you can see, bringing several of her club members to the party!) You can pledge and join today, so why not join the party?! The recognition is great and could inspire new givers to Polio Plus, but what matters most is the impact those dollars will have on the effort to eradicate polio. To be a member of the society you simply need to pledge that you'll give a minimum of $100 per year to Polio Plus until Polio is officially eradicated from the Earth!
While District membership dipped again this year, there were some club successes to celebrate. This chart shows all clubs that admitted 5 or more new members. These clubs are clearly doing some great things to invite new members.
This chart shows all clubs that had experienced net growth from July 1, 2022 - April 26, 2023 (when this report was presented at TriCon). Not all of these clubs may have finished at a net gain by the end of the year but with two months to go there clearly was lots of great momentum on the membership front for these 19 clubs (~34% of our District).
We successfully implemented another round of Membership grants. 11 Clubs received grants through one of our programs. You can see those recipients here if you didn't see them the first time around:
We had an amazing District Conference in La Crosse where 500+ Rotarians gathered for fun, learning and fellowship including over 250 Rotarians from District 6250. I loved every minute of it and am so grateful for everyone that came to La Crosse to celebrate and be a part of such an awesome event. Photos from the event are being uploaded to the TriCon facebook page. Very soon, recordings of the plenary sessions will be on the TriCon YouTube channel. Mark your calendars for TriCon24 in Green Bay, April 18-20, 2024.
8 Clubs earned the Rotary Citation. Setting goals, measuring your activity and success, learning and celebrating are signs of a healthy or improving club. Check out the recipients here: https://rotary6250.org/Stories/2022-2023-rotary-citation-recipients and learn more about the Rotary Citation here.
We had goals and we measured a lot! THANK YOU to every single Rotarian who is a member of a club, serving in District leadership and had any impact on these amazing numbers (look at those Foundation giving numbers!!! District 6250 Rotarians are so generous...thank you!)
There are probably a hundred other celebrations or data points I could share to put last year in review, but I must cut myself off somewhere. It was my pleasure to serve as your District Governor in the Imagine Rotary year of 2022-2023.