Light a fire under your club

Members say they thrive with clear, specific goals and the continuity they provide

By Arnold R. Grahl

A rainbow of colors brightens the scorecards Hilda Addah shows members of the Rotary Club of Accra-South in Ghana. The activity is a monthly exercise to let members know how the club is doing on its goals.

Red on the homemade scorecards means a goal is behind schedule, while yellow reflects progress on track and green indicates a pace ahead of schedule. The system has been in place for about five years, and Addah, the club president, says it’s helping to reveal achievement gaps and drive improvement. Committee members are motivated to keep their goals out of the red.

Many successful clubs have one thing in common: goal setting. When club leaders plan for the future, they provide their club with direction and purpose. Setting goals in areas such as membership growth, service projects, and club experience motivates members and inspires them to work together with a common purpose.

Rotary Club Central makes it simple. Accra-South club leaders set and track their goals in this online goal-setting tool for Rotary and Rotaract clubs. “Rotary Club Central is a very simple and user-friendly tool,” Addah says. “It helps me as a leader follow and track progress.”

While club leaders can use Rotary Club Central to set goals and record accomplishments, members can use it to view the club’s progress. New club leaders can use previous goals to make informed decisions about the club’s future and set up to three years’ worth of goals. They can adjust goals as needed, always planning three years ahead.

Planning for multiple years is important to ensure continuity and ease transitions in leadership.

“Some things that come out of strategic planning, you can’t do in a short period of time,” says Tony Winter, secretary and past president of the Rotary Club of Batavia, Illinois. “We also deliberately wanted some goals to stretch out longer to span different leadership teams and instill consistency in our club.” To start setting goals in Rotary Club Central, club leaders can use the club’s current situation as the baseline and its strategic plan as a guide for the next three years. Clubs should make sure incoming leaders have a My Rotary account and report their role in My Rotary to ensure they have access to the online tool.

The Batavia club learned there’s no such thing as too much communication. It decided in 2021 to use Rotary’s Club Health Check to kick-start the goal-setting process. The club sought input from the dozen new members who had joined during the COVID-19 pandemic and was thrilled when most of them took part in a visioning session, Winter says. The club used the feedback to set goals, create a strategy, and develop an action plan.

“The information we got from that session was vital in telling us, in combination with the health check, what we needed to start doing, what we needed to keep doing, and what we needed to change,” says Winter. “It was something we had never done before. It was a big step forward and gave us maybe a dozen items to work on over the next three years.”

Quantifying goals and regularly reporting progress to members can light a fire under a club, Winter says. “There’s a big difference between saying, this year let’s do some social events, and this year we are going to do six social events,” he says. “Once you put that number on it, it becomes somebody’s responsibility to get that done. When you don’t quantify it, it’s just a statement.”

Club President Margaret Perreault instituted a quarterly assembly this year to report to members on the club’s progress, complementing the updates featured in the club newsletter.

“Overcommunicating is a healthy strategy for a club,” Perreault says.

The Batavia club also uses Rotary’s Member Satisfaction Survey at least once a year to fine-tune objectives and identify new needs.

“It’s an ongoing challenge. People evolve, things evolve,” Winter says. “You need to get out in front of things. You have to constantly communicate back to the club. It’s the only way to plan.”

— February 2025