Measuring our impact

Rotary District 9685 has released its first-ever Impact Report, revealing the powerful local and global difference made through youth empowerment, community support, environmental action and international partnerships.

WORDS. PDG Niranjan Deodhar. Rotary Club of Beecroft, NSW.

What is the impact of Rotary on the world?

Curiously, nobody knows the full answer to that. We have comprehensive reports on Foundation-funded programs, and our related entities like RAWCS, ROMAC and many others also produce reports. Rotary Down Under is also a great source of impact stories, as is its global counterpart.

But as members, we know very well that this is just the tip of the iceberg. Many clubs produce comprehensive annual reports, but many don’t. Many reports emphasise the activities we undertake, rather than the impact they have. And in any case, these reports are rarely collated, analysed or aggregated to show the big picture.

Towards the end of the last Rotary year, some of us in District 9685 set out to answer that question – what is the impact of District 9685 on making our world a better place? The result of this work is our first ever District Impact Report. It summarises not only what we do, but also why it matters.

We analysed club annual reports, asked them some specific questions in some cases, and analysed the voice over transcripts of the ‘three-minute club videos’ we had launched at our conference in March. We fed all of this into AI to help analyse and summarise. The prompting and questioning we had to do with the AI tool took some toing and froing, but we got there in the end, certainly 100 times faster than reading all reports manually!

We did five things differently during the last year, which we plan to build on:

• The district conference had 25 per cent non-members attending – perhaps for the first time in Rotary we brought the community in to experience the signature event that showcases what we do.
• Launch of Pitch for Purpose – an innovation challenge for schools that applies design thinking to challenge statements to do with protecting the environment.
• Launch of Rotary Film Festival – a series of three-minute videos from each club either showcasing one project or introducing the club as a whole through its activities.
• Launch of ‘Valued Donor Program’, which opens new avenues of fund raising and pushes down the barrier for clubs to benefit from Foundation global grants

This Impact Report, which can be found at https://bit.ly/Impact9685

So, what is the impact of Rotary District 9685 on the world annually? Read on…