Our Public Image
“Happiness is not readymade. It comes from your own actions.”
Liz is the Chair of Public Image for our District and is also the Rotary Public Image Coordinator for our Zone which encompasses New Zealand and the Pacific Islands.
Liz outlined these roles as educating Rotarians about our visual identity and being our Resource point of contact. She gave us several examples of where she was able to “connect up the dots” eg Dr. Larry and the lack of funding for Koru Care and linking them with the Riccarton Rotary Youth Trust. The outcome was that Koru Care now has financial support for $ 100K over 3 years. Because Liz travels over all the 6 Districts it gives her a wonderful opportunity to make contacts and be able to connect people. A role she finds particularly satisfying.
A large part of her role is to write stories and promote what we do across all media. She runs our District Facebook page and contributes continually to our Oceania Facebook page for NZ. She also helps with our branding on brochures, events and promotional material for any club.
The main focus of her marketing and promotion is to encourage clubs to work together on projects for greater impact in the community e.g. The squatter camp underwear campaign where everyone in NZ became involved in giving underwear through a social media promotion leading to approximately 3,000 pairs of underwear being donated. As Liz said “it brings Rotary into the public spotlight “.
“By advertising the benefits of what Rotary does for a person, organisation, school etc. the aim is to encourage those who wish to volunteer in the community to join Rotary. Membership and our image to the public go hand in hand. You can’t have one without the other. We must constantly show why our organisation is different to others as we are up against a lot of competition with other organisations. “
Sourcing project stories from all our Rotary clubs is a lot of work and she spends many hours trawling through sites to pick up any leads that could be of interest. Liz also writes articles for Rotary Down Under (RDU) magazine and this helps promote what we are doing in Rotary in NZ worldwide through our own communication channels.
Part of her role is to educate Rotarians through training and giving inspiring presentations to encourage them to tell the public about Rotary. This means that she travels all over NZ and once a year goes to the Islands to provide promotional assistance and training while researching projects Rotary clubs are involved in.
Liz is the Cochair of our largest multi training event in NZ called South Pacific Presidents Elect Training (SPPETS) and is about to commence her third year in this role. She works closely with the National Training team to make this conference style and training event the success that it is.
The many hats that Liz wears also means that she runs events and is the co-chair of the second combined NZ – Australia Rotary Conference which is to be held in Christchurch in September 2019. She is also a Facilitator working with the NZ District Governor group as we make changes to our Rotary districts in the years ahead.
As Liz said she is still just a Rotarian with a strong sense of service and enjoys the friendships she’s made and the hands on projects within our own club and thanked us for supporting her in her District and Rotary International work she does.