The World Changed Overnight.

Six weeks ago the acceleration of Coronavirus cases forced an end to Club face-to-face meetings.  Within a week, the Government required everyone to minimise day-to-day contact with others, and a week later, the UK entered “Lockdown”, with more stringent rules to stay at home.

Our Challenge

Our Members needed support to prevent the ill-effects of isolation, needed continuing Rotary Fellowship, and our Club needed to continue to help those charities and good causes which we had supported in the past.  In addition, we had to continue to conduct Club Business.

We needed tools which would allow the Club to meet “virtually”, and which all Members needed to be able to access and use.  It had to be based on Computers, or Tablet (iPad, Samsung Galaxy) or Smartphone based, and the set-up needed to be trivially easy beacuse personal tuition face to face wouldn’t be feasible because of the lockdown.

Selecting the Right Tool

We examined several products, of which one was Zoom.  Zoom is being used by many Rotary Clubs and Districts in the UK - and the free version, although limited to 40 minutes, was trivially easy to use. 

Two full scale tests involving 7-9 Members validated this assumption.  Zoom was selected as our video-conferencing product.

Great Success

We have held our March and April management meetings - Joint Services Meeting, Club Council, a special Budgetary and Donations meeting, and a Business Meeting (and two fellowship meetings) all on Zoom. 

Several Meetings had 100% attendance

At the first Business Meeting of Lockdown we had 16 Members, just under 85% of our Membership attended, far exceeding what we have at a physical meeting.  Subsedquent meetings had more nearly 95% attendance!