1st Rotaract Interest Meeting

The First Meeting

The first meeting of any organization is always a leap of faith. You never know if you will have enough people to fill the seats or enough seats for the people. Tonight's Rotaract interest meeting was no different. For the past two weeks I have been setting off on a personal endeavor to form a Rotaract Club for the Fremont/Milpitas/Newark area. Countless hours have been spent contacting local Rotary clubs, meeting with individuals, posting publicity materials around town, and tabling at local community colleges. And I'm happy to say that it all paid off. :) 

Some of the meeting materials! :)

Before the Meeting

I spent the better part of my late afternoon and early evening prepping for the meeting. This included picking up the meeting materials and putting together a meeting agenda. For tonight's meeting, I created two table cards to identify that the Rotaract meeting was at the table, as well as thank you cards for each person to walk away with. The thank you cards served a three purposes: 1) it gave each person something tangible & nice to take home, 2) it served as a nice name card when people wrote their names on the card, and 3) it gave people lots of empty space to exchange contact information in case they didn't have their business cards with them or if they simply needed something to take notes with. 

The Meeting

In complete honesty, at first I thought the turnout might just be a small handful of people--five or eight people. People started arriving 15 minutes to 7, and by the time 7 PM rolled around, we already had TWELVE young professionals sitting at our table. Over the next few minutes, four more young professionals trickled in, and we were joined by three Rotarians (members of local Rotary Clubs) as well! A sixteen person turnout for our first meeting without much in-person publicity! That's pretty exciting! I'm happy to report that after a successful turnout and meeting, we're making arrangements to move ahead with forming the Rotaract Club.

What Now?

The next few weeks will be dedicated to continuing to meet on a regular basis, but most importantly we will be discussing with the entire group membership requirements, membership dues, guidelines for a club constitution, club goals, and the frequency of events. At the same time, I will continue outreaching to the Rotary clubs that I have already contacted, and I will also push further into contacting other Rotary clubs in both Newark and Milpitas. The one thing that I have learned from organizing groups is that it is never an overnight or one-time deal---it's a community that you have to put your heart and time into building in order for it to flourish.

Onwards and upwards! :)

Publicity ABCs

Publicity, publicity, publicity. When starting a new organization--or in my case a chapter of an international club--the biggest challenge is getting other people to know about your group. Specifically, getting the right people to find out about your new group and to convince them to stop by a meeting.

The question then comes down to: what are effective ways to publicize your group while encouraging the right people to get involved. And of course there is no right or wrong way to answer that question, but what over four years of community organizing and non-profit management has taught me is that there are a number of techniques that you should cover. I call these the "publicity ABCs."

Publicity ABCs:

• All the stops. When you are starting a new organization--even if it is a chapter or part of a larger national or international organization--you want to pull all the stops. Simply paying for an advertisement to run through Facebook or posting a few flyers on bulletin boards is not enough. In order to truly succeed and hit the ground running from the beginning, you need to plan and execute every publicity tactic you can think of. Flyering, pinning posters, facebook ads, google ads, craigslist postings, meetup.com, bulletin boards, business windows, word of mouth, tabling, club fairs, and just about anything and everything else!
• Bulletin boards. Most coffee shops, popular restaurants, community colleges, and public facilities will have a community bulletin board for postings to be left on. It's a great, free way to get word of your organization out there. Just check with the manager to see if you can leave a posters or flyer on there. 
• Community centers & hotspots. Think about who your target audience is, and then think about where that audience tends to hang out during their off hours. Those hotspots are the perfect places to spread word about your organization. Check if they have a bulletin board, or if there are any other publicity options they have available. 

Rotaract Materials for Publicity ABCs


Last Tuesday, I designed a poster about the Rotaract Club of Fremont, Milpitas, & Newark. I made sure it had some neat tear-off contact sheets for convenient access for people on the go. I also quickly recycled the design into smaller flyers. After about 20 minutes of work, I popped online to kinkos.com and sent in an order through their online system. The best part is that I was able to snag a 20% off coupon for kinkos orders by just Googling "Kinkos coupon codes." In the long run it only saves you a few bucks, but when you're doing any sort of community organizing and working with no budget, every dollar you save is a dollar you can invest back into something else later on. (Even if that something is a bowl of broccoli cheddar from Panera Bread after a long day's work.) Almost magically, the posters and flyers were ready about 30 minutes later. As a word of advice, Kinkos--as well as some other printers--charge a labor fee for cutting just about anything. Fortunately, almost all print shops have self-serve manual paper cutters for you to use. After about 30 minutes of cutting, I had a 72 flyers and 12 posters ready to go. Now all I had to do was find homes for the them.

Community Boards, Rotary meeting, & the Ohlone College Club Fair


I spent the better part of the next couple of days visiting local coffee shops and hotspots to talk to business managers and pin the posters and flyers up on their community boards. Last Wednesday, I was also able to visit the Fremont Warm Springs Sunrise Rotary Club's meeting to spread the word of Rotaract to their club and invite them to our first interest meeting this Wednesday. I was really excited to receive such a warm response from the Rotarians. In fact, it was really their support that has helped fuel the progress for the development of this Rotaract club.

I also had the opportunity to publicize at Ohlone Community College's campus club, while helping Fiona out with her new club, Friends of Students with Disabilities. Fiona was gracious enough to allow me to share her table--without which, I would not have had the opportunity to publicize at the club fair since I am not a student at Ohlone. Seeing the eyes of students light up after talking to them about Rotaract and the opportunities it opens up was worth the trip alone. I love talking to young people about service, careers, and traveling; listening to their dreams and helping them find ways to make those dreams in reality is something that never fails to excite me.

After hearing over two dozen positive responses from young professionals, it looks like this might actually be happening after all! Now, for the final stretch before the first meeting this Wednesday.

Meetup.com

Meetup.com features multiple meetup groups that allow individuals to get involved with a group for their common interest. You can find just about any sort of interest group on there--from knitting lovers to happy hour groups. It was not until recently that I began to really be active on meetup.com. This is because I have found that most meetup groups tend to be populated by individuals over the age of 28 or simply don't interest me at all. But that doesn't change the fact that there are two great caveats to using meetup.com to start a group:

1. All of the organizational tools you need to start a new group/club are enabled for you in your meetup group package.
2. Its just another great way to easily tap into a network of people already looking to find a group to join.

Since it doesn't hurt the cause, and it definitely can only help spread word of Rotaract, I started a meetup group for the Rotaract Club of Fremont/Milpitas/Newark (meetup.com/rotaract). The downside is that the organizer dues are $72 for a 6-month period. This due allows one to create up to three groups on meetup.com. A little trick that I learned after reading some reviews is that if you go through the group creation process and stop right before the payment process and wait 24 hours, Meetup.com will actually send you an one-time 50% off offer, bringing the dues down to $36 for 6-months, which isn't bad at all.

Now, with a little bit of luck we'll get some interest for Rotaract drummed up through Meetup.com. :)

Rotaract Club of Fremont/Milpitas/Newark

One of my most recent projects has been starting a chapter of Rotaract in my hometown in California, Fremont. Rotaract is an international service & business club for young professionals from the ages of 18 to 30.

I have had the fortune of being in Rotaract for the past four years up at Davis, and it has opened huge doors for me. It is because of my Rotaract, that I have been met so many great people in my life. It is because of Rotaract that I have been able to travel to Salt Lake City, Montreal (Canada), New York City, and Los Angeles for international conventions where over 20,000 service-minded professionals come together to talk about helping humanity. It is this kind of opportunity that I want to be able to extend to other young professionals in the bay area; for Interactors to be able to continue their Rotary family experience if they stay in the bay area; and to train young professionals to become the Rotarians of tomorrow.

With my goal in mind, I have set out to gather together support from the local Rotary Clubs as well as an interest group of young professionals together. Since many of my bay area contacts currently live in San Jose and Milpitas, I decided it was only natural to extend the club to include Milpitas and Newark as a tri-city club would attract much more support.

For the past week and half, I have been in touch with the local Rotary clubs to pitch Rotaract to their presidents and representatives. I have received positive responses from both the Niles Rotary and Fremont Warm Springs Sunrise Rotary clubs so far. The next two weeks will really be a focus on getting the other Rotary clubs in Fremont on board---and then connecting with the Newark and Milpitas clubs.

After talking to a few people, I have set the first general interest meeting to be next Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 7 PM at the Pacific Commons Panera Bread in Fremont. As the case with every organization or group I have ever started up in the past: I'm nervous, uncertain, but determined. I am worried that no one will show up to the meeting, but I'm also determined to see this through. Time to start spreading the word of Rotaract!

This is for the creative entrepreneur, the community organizer, and the dreamer.

Since the start of this century, I have had my on and off phases with blogs: deadjournal, livejournal, movabletype, xanga, wordpress, blogger, tumblr----I've been through all of them, and I find myself once again blogging. I have blogged for a variety of reasons--for myself, for my peers, for no reason at all--but this is the first time I have started a blog specifically for those like-minded entrepreneurs out there; for the creatives; for the community organizers; for the dreamers. This blog is dedicated to the people who want to become agents of change; the dreamers out there who want to take the initiative to make their dreams into reality.

My name is Mitty and I am a fresh graduate of the University of California, Davis. I have been working in non-profit management for the past five years now, and plan on continuing organizing communities, starting new businesses, and running non-profits. I have an ambition for change, and I'm an entrepreneur that'll run with a great idea as soon as I hear it. Whether or not we know each other, I invite you to read into my experiences and my musings.