 | https://rotary.de/vision-rotary-digital-2025/today.html |
| https://rotary.de/vision-rotary-digital-2025/today.html |
Beim Governor Elect Training Seminar in Nürnberg wurde den Incoming Governors über Tools berichtet, die es heute schon gibt, um von den Vorzügen der Digitalisierung in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen Distrikt, Clubs und anderen Stakeholdern zu profitieren. An dieser Stelle wird die Kurzform der Rede in englischer Sprache abgebildet, um diese Inhalte auch hier zu teilen.
There are lots of online meeting services like Zoom, Skype or GoToMeeting. Many clubs and districts already made experiences with this way of collaboration. It is important to understand that the online meeting does not replace the personal meeting – but it expands its reach.
Each and every district and each club has its own history and its own individual information which is being forwarded from one governor / president to the next. In earlier times large file folders with lots of paper were being passed on. Today this can be done with a cloud solution. In Germany we have a system called RO.Cloud. Whichever cloud solution you might chose, always make sure that it fulfils the requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation of the European Union, or short GDPR.
If you want to create your own channel from district to all Rotarians of your district, you can set up your own blog. The easiest way to do so, is to use social media. You can use one of the many blogging platforms. Or you can set up a district Facebook page, that can also be used by the next governor. If you decide to start this kind of open communication between district, clubs and Rotarians, be advised: You will need relevant content, that is really interesting to your audience. Just to write: Yesterday I was there and today I am here, is not enough. Three words sum it up: Content is king. Besides your official district facebook page you can also setup a closed group. Such a closed group can be found by anyone, but only the members can see the texts or pictures. So these Facebook groups are useful for district internal communication. If someone wants to join such a group she or he must apply for it.
Three groups of stakeholders are our target audience for our Short and Long Term Exchange Programs as well as for RYLA-seminars or KidsCamps: teachers, parents and students. We in our districts are interested in informing these stakeholders about what we have to offer. In times of the General Data Protection Regulation we need to make sure that we only contact people who really want us to do so. Good thing: there is an easy way to do this. And this is called double-opt-in-newsletter. So what do you need? You need your district's own newsletter-e-mailing-system. With that you let each recipient confirm its e-mail-address. We will be able to communicate with schools, teachers, even with interested parents and students in a most convenient way. The whole subscibe- and unsubscribe-management is being done by the newsletter-system. No more Excel lists, everything up to date and data protected in the cloud on a server in the European Union.
There are online survey tools, that you can use to find out, what the Rotarians in your district think. You might ask the Rotarians of your district, what they want to learn. To do so, you can setup a GDPR-compliant online survey with questions and answering options. This is easy to fill out for the Rotarians, and also easy to evaluate.
Training events, where Rotarians get together and meet each other in person, are truely important. But there are some special interest trainings we could also provide online. For example trainings for the foundation-representatives of the clubs could be held as webinars. These webinars could be recorded and made available as on demand videos to be watched also later on. It is possible to set up a password-protected district video channel. By doing this, each district could easily build it's own localized training channel.
In my district the district conference is the highlight of the rotarian year. We come together to celebrate friendship. For these events we sell tickets to the members of our clubs. Only a few years ago Rotarians ordered the tickets by telephone or fax or mail and the whole registration management had to be done manually. Today we use an online ticketing tool and the whole process is so much easier than before. Rotarians order and pay their tickets online and automatically receive them by e-mail after the payment has been processed. The tickets do not even have to be printed. It is enough to bring the PDF on the smartphone.
