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Upcoming Events
International Rotary Women's Day Breakfast
United Services Club
Mar 01, 2018
7:00 AM – 8:45 AM
 
Lunch Meeting
The Brisbane Club
Mar 05, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
 
Lunch Meeting
The Brisbane Club
Mar 12, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
 
Sandstone Pt Dinner with Ian Risely
Sandstone Point Hotel
Mar 18, 2018
5:00 PM – 9:00 PM
 
Districts 9600, 9630, 9640, Dinner with Ian Risely
Fitzy's Hotel
Mar 19, 2018
6:30 PM – 9:30 PM
 
Lunch Meeting
The Brisbane Club
Mar 26, 2018
12:30 PM – 1:45 PM
 
District 9600 District Conference
Maroochy RSL Events Centre
Apr 20, 2018 6:00 PM –
Apr 22, 2018 12:00 PM
 

Meeting Roster

26 February 2018

Meeting Cancelled

5 March 2018

President              D Vankov
Chair                      G Bishop
Minutes                 C Shepherd
Attendance/        D Schellbach
Raffle                      L Marshall
 

12 March 2018

President              D Vankov
Chair                      S Francis
Minutes                 M Williams
Attendance/        J Smerdon
Raffle                      L Marshall

19 March 2018

Meeting Cancelled

26 March 2018

President              D Vankov
Chair                      J Frew
Minutes                 C Shepherd
Attendance/         D Schellbach
Raffle                     J Smerdon
Speakers
Mar 01, 2018 7:00 AM
Julie MacDonald OAM
The Forthcoming Commonwealth Games at the Gold Coast and gender inequality in sport.
Mar 01, 2018 7:00 AM
District 9600 DGE Wendy Protheroe
Breaking Down the Barriers: Women's rise to overcome gender inequality in the boardroom.
View entire list
ClubRunner
Stories
STOP PRESS!! 2 Meetings Cancelled!

Meeting 26th February CANCELLED

Mambers are encouraged instead to attend the Rotary Club of Brisbane IWD Breakfast Seminar at 7am on Thursday 1st March at the United Services Club.
Bookings: https://www.trybooking.com/book/event?eid=337369
 

Meeting 19th March CANCELLED

Members are encouraged instead to attend one of the two dinners being given in honour of Rotary International President Ian Risely
 
Click on the Links below for more information:
 
 
 
President's Message 22 February 2018
Dear Fellow Rotarians & Friends of the Club
 
Mark Williams is our newest Paul Harris Fellow. I will be presenting him with his well-deserved pin during our next meeting on the 5th of March.
 
Only 9 members showed on the 19th of February lunch meeting. On one side it was disappointing but on the other we could all sit around one table and have a good discussion on Club business. Instant feedback from some members was that they enjoyed the meeting in this format much more than many other meetings. This sparked ideas which prompted me to ask some of the questions I distributed to members in the form of a survey. You can read more on the survey further down.
 
On 23rd of February, Rotary will mark its 113th year. My contribution for the anniversary is that I went in and updated the RCoB members' information in RDU records. Now all members shall be getting their copies of the magazine. May be it is not a bad idea this anniversary to remind us to look deeper into the Rotary membership problems well depicted by low attendance, too. Let's ask the questions: Who do we actually target? Do we know who they are and what they want? What value proposal comes from the Club? Is it tailored to those people we target? I have distributed during the meeting short descriptions of the different generations we are dealing with. May be a good guest speaker with recruitment background can give us some deeper insights?!
 
In relation to seeing answers I am working towards making our Ideas Factory with QUT Business School a success. I met with the team of facilitators who are as excited about the opportunity as I am. Dr John Bensley and Dr Antony Peloso will lead the exercise. They are both corporate educators. John is also the Academic director of QUT Canberra in addition to his family ties with Rotary. His father was a dedicated Rotarian and PHF. John himself is a RYLA graduate.  There are currently 30+ people registered for the event with two more weeks to go so hopefully the number will go up.
 
Mentioning RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards), the next one is scheduled between 5 and 11 May 2018 at the Luther Heights Youth Camp, Coolum. Clubs are invited to nominate participants and RCoB is collecting applications to be reviewed at our next Board meeting on the 12th of March. If there is anyone, aged 18 to 26, you would like to nominate, please, let me know so that I can send you the application form. Applications must be submitted on District level by 3rd of April.
 
Another thing I would like to stress on is the Rotary Foundation District Grants. As you know I am discussing a chicken-breeding project for the Solomon Islands and PNG was also added on the map. Last week I met with Celia Grenning from Kyeema Foundation. Chris Muir, RCoB PE, and Michael Evans, Mid-city PP, were also present. The idea is to submit a district grant application for a small project with PNG in focus which fits very well with Chris's priorities for next year. The next deadline is April 26. While it is still worth to go for a district grant I got thinking how effective this process is in the case of our Club. Last year RCoB donated approximately 7,000 USD to the Foundation. This year if we want to carry a project with the Foundation support we have to complete a 16 page application form and hope for it to be approved for a project capped at 5,000 AUD grant support. We still have to provide 2,500 AUD as our own contribution. If we are lucky to get selected then we have to submit four interim reports and a final one. This is a fair amount of work that can be avoided by simply directing Club money to Club projects – something the Board may want to consider further.
 
I have recently invited members to become active as "Members in the spot light". This might bring extra pressure to the meeting schedule which is why I redesigned the running sheet putting fixed timeframes for all usual activities. We shall aim for improved time-keeping and meeting Chairs shall have a good grip on the bell. Here are the members that signed-up so far:
 
  • 05/03/2018 – Luke Marshall
  • 12/03/2018 – Tony Pilkington
  • 26/03/2018 – Phil Gresham
  • 02/04/2018 – Jacqui Page
  • 09/04/2018 – Denise Schellbach
The Rotary Club of Brisbane did not have a Board meeting on the 19th due to lack of quorum and with the power given me by the Club Constitution I cancelled the meetings on:
 
Half of my year as President is long gone and as promised in the beginning of the year I went back to check how members feel about the Club. However, this time I did not use standard Rotary survey but rather asked simple questions that I think are important and relevant in our case. I received 15 replies out of 35 members.
 
The most worrying fact is that only 6 of the respondents said firmly that they did not consider resigning from the Club in the past 12 months and only 7 definitely see themselves as members in 5 years for the Club 100th anniversary. This may be due to facts such as only 7 of the respondents believe the Club hears what you have to say and only 6 think that their presence in the Club makes a true difference. Only 6 are certain that they get enough value from the Club for their money.
 
On the positive side 14 of the respondents see the work of the Club President as transparent and 11 see the work of the Club itself as transparent. The Board of the Club is seen as transparent by 6 of the members that provided answers. As a means to both get members involved and improve Board transparency an idea as a result of the Monday experience was investigated. Given the Club low attendance and membership numbers the Board meetings can become part of the regular ones so that all members can attend and have a say even if they do not have voting right on the Board. Smaller clubs, e.g. Mundubbera, have every meeting as a general one and all members vote. This might not be possible for us under the current constitution but we could be looking for a creative solution and 12 of the survey respondents support the above one. This may also save time for Board members who will not have to stay extra hours after the regular meetings.
 
Another positive feedback is that the current meeting setup with round tables (9 replies) and speakers (11 replies) are still the preferred options.  As long as the current breakfast trial is concerned 8 members say they won't be attending and 7 say they will be attending a regular breakfast meeting if one of the Club meetings per month shifts to breakfast. 10 members say having less meetings will have no impact on their relative attendance while 5 members say they will improve their as a consequence. I guess that those 5 members are ones that aim at attending fortnightly and having less meeting would mean that they could attend all of them. 
 
As mentioned with only 15 members completed the survey so it is not representative but it gives some food for thought till the next meeting at least.
 
Again, the regular meeting on the 26th is cancelled. See you all on the 5th of March with Luke Marshall as our "Member in the spot light". We won't have a guest speaker as Denise cancelled all of them until we have a straightforward programme of when and where we meet.
President Daniel
Meeting Notes 19th February 2018
Your minutes secretary apologises for the paucity of prose in this week's minutes. Fortunately most of the action is captured in Daniel's Presiden's Message above. The minutes secretary pleads that he was busy with chairing the meeting and taking part in the refreshingly active discussion around the table. And he wrote the minutes on time but the dog ate them.
 
Chair for the meeting was Mark Williams. There were 7 members present and Robyn Burridge, who has submitted an application for membership. Apologies were noted as being received from Stan Francis, James Delahunty, Don O'Donoghue, Denise Schellbach and Michael Stephens.
 
There being no guest speaker, PP Keith Watts took the opportunity to call an impromptu Membership Committee meeting with all present invited to contribute. Discussion was lively and good ideas were aired.
 
Mark Williams took a spot to describe the functionality of the clubrunner club management platform. This week's bulletin is once again produced using the clubrunner platform. Clubrunner is a suite of integrated cloud applications including:
  • eBulletins: This alone is estimated to save a couple of full-time weeks per annum in reduced editing time, but also has an intuitive story editor that will allow any member with editor access to write stories for inclusion in the buletin and indeed on the home page if the Clubrunner web page functionality is utilised.
  • Event Management. Publicity, registrations, collecting money - all in an integrated application. Sort of our own trybooking site with the ability to publish to bulletins, websites, social media and custom EDMs in one package.
  • Volunteer management. Collect signons for project tasks *and* give personalised reminders in the ebulletins.
  • Attendance and participation tracking. Saves the secretary time in keeping track of attendances, leave of absence, makeups etc. Also has customisable participation metrics to capture the contribution of those who might not be able to make all meetings but nevertheless actively participate in the life of the club.
  • Integration with Rotary International database. Only need to maintain membership information in one place. Members can manage their club profile, selected portions of which can be pushed to the RI database and the club directory. Each member can control which info gets published through privacy settings.
  • If the Rotary district uses Clubrunner, the ability to puish club events into the district calendar and pull district events into the club calendar. (Aside: District 9630 uses clubrunner to manage the district - but not the website functionality - and strongly encourages clubs in the district to use clubrunner. Several other districts in ANZ also use Clubrunner.)
  • Single repository for club calendar and upcoming speakers for automatic publication in bulletins and potentially on the website.
  • Free website hosting and nice widgets for pushing club info to the website if we choose to use it.
Someone won the raffle but did not draw the joker. Jackpot is now up to 25 Mundubbera timeshare units.
 
President Daniel close the meeting with the singing of the national anthem at 1350 hours.
Meeting Notes 21st February, 2018 (Breakfast)
Bright and early at 7am on Wed 21st February 8 members and one Rotary Peace Fellow attended the second trial breakfast meeting at the Brisbane Club. Keith Watts chaired the meeting and welcomed all present, inviting them to enjoy Breakfast for 10 minutes.
 
Chair Keith then donned the President's delegate hat to present the President's message, after which he invited Rotary Peace Fellow from the incoming XVI cohort, Morgan Marks to present to the audience.
 
Morgan showed members a very interesting photomontage of her time during two tours as an American Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia, during which she let us know some of her personal story and how she came to be a Rotary Peace Fellow. 
 
The next item on the agenda was a sort-of repeat of Dan Adler's member in the spotlight presentation from last week. I write "sort-of", because Dan actually switched up some of the content and focussed more on the philosophy of the business and less on the output of the business. Those of us who had seen the prior presentation found plenty new and interesting in the reprise.
 
Following Dan's presentation, Chair Keith closed the meeting with the singing of the national anthem at 8am.
People are asking to join, why are we ignoring them?

By Bob Wallace, Rotary Coordinator for Zone 24 East and a member of the Rotary Club of Port Hope, Ontario, Canada

Rotarians in District 7070 package bags with items for childrens’ birthday parties to be delivered to local food banks.

At our zone institute in Winnipeg, I saw a presentation about Rotary’s membership leads program and how districts are receiving many requests from the program but not following up on the leads.

Later, I was at Rotary headquarters in Evanston, Illinois, USA, for training as a Rotary Coordinator, and Brian King, RI Director of Membership Development, pointed out to us how failing to follow up on these leads represented a major public image failure. Think about it. A person makes contact with you, and you totally ignore them? What does that say about your organization?  In the business world, companies often make cold calls to generate business, sometimes with no results. In this case, people are coming to us asking to join.

In District 7070, we researched the outstanding list of membership leads and saw that there were many names that we had never contacted. Many times, when you ask people why they haven’t joined Rotary, they will say “I was never asked.” Taking that to heart, we also considered the professional research Rotary has received showing that Rotarians join for friendship and social activities. So we decided to use an old tried and true method of contact. We called to talk to each of the leads.

“The main message here is email does not work; a personal call is best.”

This took some time to call all the outstanding leads. But the first impression has worked well. We describe our district, what clubs we have available and their locations. The lead is able to ask questions. In some cases, it was easy to suggest a nearby club, but for others, it was more difficult. In some cases, we suggested a couple clubs they could visit. We then emailed the lead club information, meeting times, and locations. We also emailed the club president and asked them to call the lead and invite them to a meeting. The main message here is email does not work; a personal call is best.

The end result is we have several new members joining our clubs. One example is a lead that joined a club and is now serving on the district conference planning committee. Another lead attended our district conference to learn more about Rotary. Finally, one of the leads mentioned that she wanted to join Rotary now so that when her parents, who are Rotarians, arrive in Toronto for the 2018 convention, she will be a Rotarian to host them.

So what do you say? Isn’t it worth picking up the phone and calling those membership leads?
People of Action campaign rocks San Diego airport
 

People of Action videos greeted travelers at the San Diego International Airport 10-24 January.

By Scott Carr, 2017-18 governor of District 5340

We enjoy serving as the host district for Rotary’s annual training event of incoming district governors here in San Diego, California, and are honored to provide volunteers to help with transportation, serve as hospitality night hosts, and greet arriving leaders at the airport. It is an important role. When you’ve been flying in a cramped airplane for 20 hours or more, there is no better sight than a smiling Rotarian to greet you and help you get to your destination.

But airport restrictions limit our reach as greeters. So we had the spark of an idea. What if we could build upon the on-site Rotary presence and roll-out a Rotary welcome as soon as members stepped off the plane?

The People of Action displays were placed at 20 locations throughout the airport.

Our People of Action campaign at the San Diego International Airport ran from 10-24 January. Our district negotiated with the on-site advertising distributor to run 10 second video clips at 20 different locations throughout the terminals. In addition, the People of Action campaign included seven enormous 6 foot by 6 foot backlit ads that were very tough to miss.

Once the campaign went live, we launched a social media campaign to help raise visibility of the ads. All told, we spent about $700 in Facebook advertising to encourage people to look for the ads at the airport. We were able to make it fun and engaging, while also providing weather, San Diego insider knowledge, and real-time updates from International Assembly.

Keep in mind, not everyone takes a plane to the assembly. For those traveling by land, we spent about $300 in advertising on Waze, a popular app that provides driving directions. Every time someone drove close to one of our local Rotary clubs on their way to International Assembly (or anywhere else in San Diego), they would see a Rotary logo appear, and be able to click on it for more information on that club.

In the end, this year’s assembly was a huge success, and the results of our campaign exceeded our wildest expectations.

People of Action was seen by nearly 800,000 travelers at the airport. We heard wonderful feedback on how impressed Rotarians were to see Rotary branding at a major U.S. airport. On social media, over the same two-week period, our $700 investment in Facebook ads reached over 199,000 social media users, while boosting the District’s audience from 305 “likes” to over 32,000. And our $300 Waze campaign was seen over 325,000 times, resulting in 597 visits to local Rotary club websites.

Putting together this campaign, using traditional, video, and digital ads, was a unique opportunity for us to work with the team that created the People of Action campaign at Rotary’s headquarters. We were incredibly grateful for their help and financial support in turning this spark of an idea into reality. Best of all, we expect the benefit of this branding locally, as well as the enormous increase in our audience on social media, to pay off significantly in the years ahead and help us continue making a difference.

Launch your own People of Action campaign using the new materials in the Brand Center.

Source: Rotary Voices

Club Officers

President                   Daniel Vankov
Secretary                   Michael Stephens
Treasurer                   Warren Walker
President Elect          Chris Muir
Imm. Past President  Graeme Whitmore
Sergeant-at-arms       Luke Marshall
The Rotary Club of Brisbane Inc.
ABN 75 152 438 499
GPO BOX 2909 Brisbane Qld 4001
District               9600
Club Number   17787

District Governor

John Lane

Rotary International President

Ian Riseley