Presentations with posters allowed participants to have individual discussions with trainers.

By Deepak Agrawal, past governor and 2015-16 trainer for District 3060 (India)

I have been a Rotary member for more than two decades and have attended multiple district assemblies as a club officer or trainer. We recently adopted a new approach to our assemblies, and opened them up to members who are not preparing for a new role as a club officer. Where else can these members get one-on-one information about the exciting new things happening in Rotary?

Here are a few of the changes we implemented:

• We moved the time to March, as April and May are very hot weather conditions in our region.
• We changed from a classroom style of teaching to using a poster presentation style where presenters can talk one on one with those attending. We believe members want to exchange ideas more than be preached to. Because of this approach, we enlisted 61 different Rotary members to help us present, which introduced a lot of diversity to our program.
• We sent individual emails to all 3,600 Rotary members in our district along with a printed brochure.
• We created two locations for our district assembly so that Rotary members did not have to travel as far to attend, translating into a loss of time, energy and resources. My district is large, spanning 1,200 kilometers of India, so we split our district into two attendance parts.
• As I mentioned above, we opened up attendance to all members, not just those who will be serving on a board.
• We held two special sessions, one for spouses to discuss how they can be involved in Rotary and its programs and another for past presidents to discuss how they can support and give guidance to the new teams.

This whole approach worked very well indeed. With this approach, we were pleased to have 27 percent of our district’s membership, 953 members, attend our recent assembly, a 40-year high in our district.