The Story behind the Campaign
Rotary is currently engaged in the Gates Foundation Challenge to raise $200 Million by 2012. That amounts to about $6,000 per club, worldwide.
Instead of clubs just writing cheques, RI is encouraging clubs to get the public involved, both from a monetary stance and from an educational stance.
Each club could create it’s own campaign of bake sales, car washes or other fund raisers to do their part, but this takes more effort if you have to spend time educating each donor.
At PETS in March 2009, a group of president elects from the South Okanagan discussed creating a shared campaign that would include common public relations efforts of radio spots, newspaper articles, TV news, websites, twitter posts, billboards, etc. The idea was that if there was a strong, coordinated, short campaign to educate the public, then it would make it easier for each club to raise their funds.
We decided we were lazy and wanted a campaign that was very effective in getting the word out, helping people to act on their own. We were looking for the maximum effect with the minimum effort to get in peoples minds and wallets.
To make it easy for the public to donate, the plan was to leverage the media campaign with website credit card donations, donation bins at local businesses and have a few stores collect donations at their cash registers. And now a new option of texting donations from cell phones is available.
We wanted to coordinate the campaign in such a way that we prevented overlapping events between clubs. We’re didn’t want to instruct the clubs what projects to take on, but we did want to avoid conflicts like having all the clubs show up at the mall on the same Saturday morning.
And at the end of the campaign, we wanted to have a large, fun, exciting celebration. The benefits of the campaign would not only be that we could raise a lot of money for Polio quickly and get it over with, but also we could raise the profile of Rotary and help with member recruitment and retention.
Since starting this process, it has now spread from the South Okanagan to the entire Okanagan and now we have strong interest from the rest of district 5060 on the Canadian side. | 
