Posted: 3 years ago

Besides being a professional artist and educator, I have spent much of my working life as a museum professional, directing art museum. Beside asking everyone for money, one of the items that consumed my working days was to analyze what was working and what was not (of course, if you never take risks on new thing, you will never educate your clients to new and different things so I never threw something away just because it had not been tried. As Dole Bronson, the poker master, once said: "Climb out on the thin limb because that is where the fruit is!"). Yesterday, after a conference call from Larry Levenson and others on the 2009-2010 Board, I looked again at the forum and asked myself, "Just from a numbers point of view, what is working and what is not?" (on the Forum).  I did not take the replies because I have found that not many members or visitors are comfortable with writing so I just examined the visitors (views) to an entry. Here's the results:

1. What's Up, Doc                                  4757 visitors (most replies)              

2.  eDistrict                                              3285

3. An Idea: a Global eProject             2452

4. Paul Harris Credits                            1862

5. Fun and Interesting Links               1570

6. Willing to be Seen and Heard         1468    

7. MS Challenge                                      1439

8. Classification Survey                        1420

9. Rotary Odyssey                                 1166

10. What Does the Foundation Do?  1064

The category with the least visitors and replies was Travel (because it was covered in Club and What's Up, Doc?).

What is interesting to me is that members wanted to share what was happening in their daily lives (fellowship) in What's Up, Doc? They wanted to learn from history. They wanted to read things that challenged them to think and feel. Therefore, maybe in the forum, we make What's Up, Doc? a separate sub-category under Club (always visible) and do the same with the other categories. Also we might replace Travel with Board and President's Newsletter (since some of the other things that got the most interest were future thinking and board planning).

These are just some statistics and ideas that might be helpful.

Joe