Pearl Rotary members like a lot about their Club, but they can see areas for improvement, including providing more information to new members, refining content of Tuesday morning meetings — and at the top of the list — involving and connecting new members in all aspects of the Club, including leadership development, according to initial results of a Club member survey. Top priorities for the Club for coming years: expanding charitable funds available for Club community service projects, and developing new signature PPRC community service projects.

The survey, drafted by Pearl Rotarians Don Smith, Jonelle Anderson, Matt Mahaffy and Mike Rompa, was requested to inform the Club’s current long-term strategic planning process. It was conducted on the internet using the Survey Monkey software. About 60% of active PPRC members responded, with half coming from Pearl Rotarians with less than a year’s membership.

Don Smith’s summary of the preliminary results from the survey identified five broad themes:

(1) “Enthusiasm , support, belief in the mission, pride in Pearl Rotary, excitement about growth and new members — these positives reverberate throughout the responses.”

(2) “Strong desire for more information in all aspects of the Club and Rotary. This ranges from Pearl Fund to Rotary Foundation, our dues structure, Club roster, service projects we support, more printed materials. The many ‘don’t know’ responses to questions reflect this.”

(3) “Tuesday meetings: time, place, meeting structure, programs, “Brag for a Buck” all rate highly. Still improvements were suggested by many for areas of concern or dissatisfaction, such as meeting agendas too full, speakers’ time often slighted, no firm direction to the Rotarian of the Day slot, and food is only passable.”

(4)”A significant challenge for the Club is to involve and connect new members with longer term Pearl Rotarians in all aspects of the Club — meetings, committees’ activities, Club projects, fundraising, social activities, and for the future of the Club, leadership.”

(5) “To meet the goal identified by (4) for involvement, PPRC needs considerably more dollars (giving us money to start and support our ideas for ‘service above self’) and more hands-on service projects, particularly in the area of local community service projects.”

Smith reviewed these preliminary outcomes with the PPRC long-term planning committee at its December 6 meeting, and said he would return with more detailed results including a scan of individual comments for improvement ideas that were filed by many members.