Can you create an image of your club's uniqueness from its website?

Does your club's website content communicate its unique qualities?

Can a visitor to your club’s website create a picture of the uniqueness of your Rotary club?

Could they write a 1000 word essay describing what your club does throughout a Rotary year, whether you are growing or shrinking, speculate accurately on your demographic composition, get to know the issues of your community, describe how you fund raise, what you support, your involvement in international service and so forth?

Would they get an idea that you are part of an International organization and how what is local is also international?

At one point in my career in education I taught Geography and I gave my senior class a similar assignment. Each student had to subscribe to a Canadian town, weekly newspaper and from that source construct a geography of the community. It was the mid 1970s so there was no internet of information to consult.

Creating the content of a Rotary website should be something akin to a analyzing all the stories and ads that formerly populated a weekly newspaper over a full year or longer.

Think of the ads as the permanent content you place on your site such as where and when you meet, what a Rotary club is, the areas of focus or the areas of service which populate almost all club websites.

However, I keep harping about the need to write “stories”. All those things you do or happen which make your club stand out from all the others. Just as in the weekly newspaper it was the stories which gave my students a picture of what it was like to live in the town they had chosen.

Stories on the speakers topics tell everyone how your knowledge grows about your town or city and what the focus of your concerns are as a club, and how those local concerns are mirrored at the International level.

Stories on your fundraising events and successes or failure provides an idea how you raise funds for the causes you support. Similarly stories on how you play, in other words, they tell how fellowship actually occurs.

It is in reading an accumulation of stories where a visitor, creates an image of your club, even it is done subliminally.

Hopefully, at some point, visitors will return and it will dawn on them that they like what they are seeing and would like to join in the effort to improve the community and maybe even help on a world wide problem such as clean water for everyone.

Aim for a wide variety of 52 stories a year; more if possible. Eventually you will have a collection of hundreds of stories for a visitor to cruise through.

Stories, do not have to be long; ideally around 500 words. They should follow an inverted pyramid journalistic style and have at least one or more photos.

Very few club websites have achieved such a level of content but if you find them you will learn that they are the clubs which are growing and succeeding.