Helping you succeed in promoting your club Public Image Helping you succeed in promoting your club

What is the Public Image Committee? We support Rotary’s strategic goals We help clubs We are here to answer your questions We help spread the good word of Rotary! We support Rotary’s strategic goal of enhancing the public’s image of Rotary and its awareness of our service and activities. We will help club public relations chairs and other interested Rotary members to increase membership, expand community partnerships, improve fundraising opportunities, and promote involvement in club projects. We will be available to answer public image questions and to provide support for clubs seeking public image assistance. We help spread the good word of Rotary!

How can we help you? Media relations Interview techniques How to develop relationships with the media How to tell your Rotary story Interview techniques Social and digital media outreach, websites, club bulletins Partnerships with other organizations We want to be a resource for you! If you need help with something – call on us. We can help you with media relations. This includes helping your develop relationships with your area media and working together to create the best methods to tell your Rotary story. Many times when it comes to telling our stories, we don’t really know where to start. Our committee can help you with interview techniques so you can engage members of our club and can help you develop press releases and other materials to get your message out. One of our main focuses this year is helping the clubs in our district with their social media outreach – which you will see more about a little later. We also want to help you identify partnerships with other organizations to help develop your stories and spread the good news of Rotary. If you have an idea and need some extra help – let us know and we will see how we can help you.

Social Media: Facebook If you don’t have one, create one “About Us” section Make a posting plan! Who? How often? What about? Like I said – one of our main areas of focus is going to be on social media – especially Facebook. First things first – if your club doesn’t have a Facebook account, we highly encourage you to create one. If you need help in getting this set up – we are here for you! Once you have your Rotary Facebook account created (or if you already have one) – it is important that the information under the “About Us” section is accurate and filled out in its entirety. If someone is interested enough to find your facebook page, you want to make sure they easily have access to everything about your club and this is the perfect spot for that. After that – it’s time to develop a plan for making posts to your page. Who is going to be responsible? How often are you going to post? What are you going to post about? These are all questions that need to be answered. If you have a public image committee – this would best fit under their responsibilities. If not, now may be a good time to designate a public image chairperson!

Schedule your posts You can schedule your posts months in advance! It’s important that your Facebook page remain active and is checked frequently – but that doesn’t mean that someone has to take time out of every day or even every week to create posts. Facebook makes it really easy to schedule posts months in advance. For example – let’s say you want to do a weekly member highlight – maybe call it “Member Monday.” You can spend a little time on the front end creating these posts and then schedule them in advance. You determine what date and time you want them to post! The same thing goes for other posts – maybe every Friday you want to post something highlighting our Polio efforts. Finding content is fairly easy and then you can schedule these out months in advance. We highly suggest creating a schedule for content – this will help direct your efforts and be more time efficient in posting.

Social Media: Facebook Posting Tips Try to include a picture Tag your members “Check in” to your location Post Ideas Member Spotlights Meeting Reminders Meeting Highlights A few tips when posting – try to include a picture with each post. If you just post words, your message will get lost in the clutter on people’s feeds. Either attaching a relevant picture or linking to an article will help engage people in your post. If you have a message you want to say but don’t have a picture – visit the Rotary Brand Center – they have a lot of pictures and videos for our use. Tag your members in relevant posts. If they are in pictures you are posting, take the time to tag them in them. Remember - Tagging someone broadens your audience. Anytime you can, “check in” at the location that your post is referring to. If you are posting about your meeting, check in to your meeting location. If you are posting about an upcoming event, check in to the event location. Again, checking in to your location will broaden your audience. Finding content to post about is actually pretty simple. Some easy ones to get your started include member spotlights, meeting reminders, and meeting highlights. I’m going to show a few examples in the next few slides.

Member Spotlight Ask your members to send your club’s Public Image Chair a sentence about what Rotary means to them and a picture. This could easily turn into a weekly “Member Spotlight” post. Member spotlights can be as simple or in depth as you want them to be. I have seen member spotlights be as simple as a picture of the Rotary member with the words “Our Rotary member spotlight this week is...” Other member spotlights have included entire bios. I say use whatever works for your club and what you have time for. Personally, for my club – we do different types each year. Last year, we highlighted our members on their birthdays. This year, we are highlighting members by asking them “What does Rotary mean to you?” Again – this is an opportunity for your public image committee or chairperson to decide what they have time for and what works best for your club. Remember – tag the Rotary member in the post!

Meeting Highlights Special meetings Awards, PHF, special speakers Events Posting about your meetings is another way to get the word out about your club. This could be as simple as posting each week about your upcoming meeting and speaker or more in depth with a weekly meeting summary with links to your speaker’s organization. It is great to especially post about special meetings and highlight award and Paul Harris Fellow presentations. Remember – post pictures and tag members! If you have an upcoming event – create an “event” through Facebook and invite people. This – at a minimum – gets it on people’s calendars and will send them notifications.

Link to articles blog.rotary.org rotary.org/news-features The Rotarian Magazine Another great source of content for your Facebook page is linking to articles about Rotary and Rotary projects. One of the best places that I find content is blog.rotary.org. They post articles several times a week! Rotary International also has resources available for content including their news page and the brand center. I encourage you to visit both for ideas. And we all know about the Rotarian magazine. There are some incredible articles and project highlights that are available for our use online. Linking to those is as easy as copying the webpage link to your Facebook page. An additional tip – if you can, find the author of the article that you are linking to on Facebook and tag them in your post. It will (again) broaden your audience.

Share! District 7570 Other Clubs District Projects And lastly – share what others have already put out there! This is probably the easiest way to have an active Facebook! Sharing from our District page, other clubs and district project pages such as RYLA are just a few examples. Think outside of the box – if you partner with an area organization on a project – keep an eye on their facebook page for information they may post about your shared project. That is a perfect opportunity for you to share what they post!

How can you help us? Submit information for us to share! Events, club activities, member spotlights, club spotlight Submitting is easy! Newsletter article: rotaryinformer@gmail.com Facebook Private Message – Rotary District 7570 Email me: lblevins@btes.net And before we close, we need your help, too. We want to share your news with our entire district. We will be sharing things as we can but if you have something in particular that you’d really for us to share, please let us know! We want to be an avenue to help you get your word out. There are numerous ways to submit information – if you want to include something in the newsletter, email Barbara Jo at rotaryinformer@gmail.com. You can always reach me through our District’s Facebook page or email me at lblevins@btes.net.

Contact us! Leslie Blevins, Chair 423-793-5511 lblevins@btes.net Andy Vanhook, Co-Chair 540-271-0023 andy@appealproduction.com We hope that this presentation will help you promote your club! Let us know how we can help! www.rotary7570.org