A Tradition of Service in Limbo

Civic clubs like Lions and Rotary seek ways to attract new members

Dona Avery, an administrative assistant at an Atlanta bank, has done volunteer work for 20 years but says she never considered becoming a member of a traditional service club such as the Rotary, Kiwanis, or Lions Clubs.

“I’m aware of who they are,” says Ms. Avery, who is 50. “But as far as joining, I’ll be honest. I never even thought about it.”

Ms. Avery isn’t alone. While service clubs once were magnets for young and middle-aged professionals interested in building business contacts and volunteering for civic causes, today they are attracting fewer and fewer Americans.

And, without young members to replace older ones, the average age of members has risen for many organizations. At Rotary International, the average U.S. member is 57 years old; at the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, a fraternal organization that performs charitable work, the average age is 60.

“Our age level is what’s creating the problem,” says Frank Garland, 76, an Elks spokesman. “If you figure 2.2 per cent of your membership is passing away each year, it doesn’t take long to eat into it.”

Indeed, critics say many service clubs are hobbled by aging and cliquish leadership, stale rituals, and a failure to keep up with shifting cultural patterns. As a result, some people worry that the clubs, which historically have pumped millions of dollars into humanitarian programs worldwide, will have to scale back their good works significantly.

To counter the aging-membership trend and to remain vital in the 21st century, the service clubs are taking a series of marketing and management steps, some bold, others long overdue. Some examples:

* Lions Clubs International, whose U.S. membership has dropped about 11 per cent in the past decade, to 477,000, is waging the first global image-building campaign in its 81-year history. It is paying $3-million for an advertising and public-relations campaign by Ketchum Public Relations to promote Lions activities around the globe, especially the group’s chief mission: eradicating preventable blindness. It also is teaming up with the Junior Chamber International — or Jaycees, a service organization for people ages 18 to 40 — to try to reinvigorate both groups’ memberships. The Jaycees’ international membership has fallen from 400,000 to 320,000 in the past 10 years.

* Kiwanis International, whose North American membership of roughly 253,000 is off 9 per cent from a decade ago, recently added the first marketing director in its 83-year history.

* Membership in the Elks has fallen 25 per cent since 1980, dropping from 1.6 million to 1.2 million. To help update its image, the group last year began referring to its highest officer in public as the national president, instead of by the title of “Grand Exalted Leader.”

* Rotary International, which was formed in 1905, is implementing the first strategic-planning effort to be undertaken by its world headquarters. The organization is examining everything from its computer capabilities to its coverage by the news media. In addition, it has created a special place on its Web site for Rotary volunteers to share ideas for recruiting and keeping members and created an international committee that will focus on such issues. “Without appropriate planning, without appropriate challenges to the past, you can sit around and stop growing,” says S. Aaron Hyatt, general secretary of Rotary International. “Without it you die.”

Rotary’s U.S. membership has fallen from 409,157 in 1996 to the current count of 400,854. Mr. Hyatt plays down the recent reversal. Rotary’s growth has been “strong” in the past decade, fueled in part by growth overseas, he says. A drop of a few thousand members is not “something to get real excited about and feel the sky is falling,” he says.

Still, the service-club world as a whole is struggling. Lions, for example, has been losing U.S. clubs at a rate of 11 a month since 1996. Kiwanis retires a chapter for every new one it opens.

A former Kiwanian, responding to a survey by the organization of people who quit, said: “I wanted to get involved in community service, but all this club did was meet and eat.”

In fact, 80 per cent or more of those who left Kiwanis within two years of joining cited “club operations” — everything from poor leadership and “too many cliques” to too few service projects — as their main reason for quitting. Fewer than half cited “business commitments” or a simple inability to attend meetings.

Critics also say service organizations haven’t been aggressive enough in recruiting blacks and people in other minority groups as members. Many service organizations don’t keep separate data on the racial and ethnic backgrounds of their members, however, so it is difficult to evaluate their progress on diversification.

Some groups have made advances. Walter G. Sellers, who is black, served as Kiwanis’ 1997-98 international president, for example, and the Chicago district governor for Lions also is black. In addition, Lions officials point to ethnic clubs that have formed around the country, including one in Chicago whose membership is made up mostly of people from Thailand.

Even with their membership problems, some service clubs still can be counted among the nation’s biggest philanthropies. Rotary placed No. 115 this year on The Chronicle‘s Philanthropy 400 list of charities that raise the most in private donations.

But it is clear that service clubs are facing much stiffer competition for donations for humanitarian projects, such as Rotary’s effort to contribute $500-million by 2005 for polio immunizations worldwide. Rotary collected more than it did last year — $69.8-million compared with $64.8-million last year — but still fell five places on the list. And Lions Clubs slipped 73 places to No. 391 on this year’s Philanthropy 400 list with $22-million in private support, down from $24.2-million last year.

Much of the clubs’ fund raising is done through small-scale events such as pancake breakfasts and Christmastime poinsettia sales. A drop in club membership in Pittsburgh or Peoria could mean fewer dollars for humanitarian aid in Panama or Peshawar.

Noting the impact of a drop in U.S. members, Kiwanis spokesman David Williams says, “It really starts squeezing the budget. It’s not panic time, but it adds up.”

The decline in service clubs’ U.S. membership might be worse were it not for two ameliorating forces.

One is the influx of women. In the 1980s, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the Jaycees and Rotary to allow female members. The Court said that the generally open nature of Rotary’s membership policies and the public purposes of their service activities, among other things, did not allow for gender discrimination.

Since then, other clubs have also opened their ranks to women, either because the groups came under the court ruling or because they could no longer resist diversification.

Women now account for about 15 per cent, or 59,000 people, among Rotary’s U.S. membership, and they make up about 13 per cent of Lions’ domestic ranks.

The other moderating force is the clubs’ growth overseas, most notably in emerging markets such as Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe. Lions’ non-U.S. membership is up by about a third since 1980, while Rotary’s has climbed about 51 per cent, to some 801,000 members in 21,582 foreign clubs.

Service-club officials attribute the overseas growth to multiple factors: a strong need for medical and other service projects in developing countries, a longstanding cultural pattern of volunteerism abroad, and most important, perhaps, the fact that membership in a service organization remains a mark of prestige for upper-level business people in places like Japan and Europe.

In the United States, however, service clubs no longer hold the cachet they once did. Exactly why that is occurring is open to debate.

Many scholars and club executives argue that membership is in decline in America because young and middle-aged men and women simply don’t have the time or inclination to be joiners or to care much about civic causes.

But some observers disagree. It is questionable, they say, whether volunteerism is really decreasing. Nearly half of the American adults polled in 1996 by the Gallup Organization said they had done volunteer work in the previous year, about the same as in 1988, according to a report by Independent Sector, a Washington group that represents many of the nation’s largest charities and foundations. The survey showed that the rate of volunteering was highest for those aged 25 to 54 — people in their prime working years who once represented the core of the nation’s service clubs and fraternal organizations. And many volunteers also are shifting their allegiance away from traditional service clubs and toward new avenues of public service — everything from environmental and political groups to organizations that help the homeless.

What is more, charitable groups that require large blocks of time, physical energy, or other commitments are growing, not shrinking. Do Something, a charity that trains young people for community-leadership roles in a growing list of cities, has used MTV and support from pop icons like Queen Latifah to get out its message.

“The number of people who are interested in being involved has really never gone up or down,” Bill Hoogterp, a Do Something leader in Newark, N.J., says of the volunteer scene. “It’s just our ability to tap and channel it that ebbs and flows.”

Norman Dahl, a 46-year Lions veteran, agrees. “Volunteerism is not dead, it’s very much alive,” he says. But, he adds, too many service clubs are hampered by “old ideas.”

Mr. Dahl advises an innovative Lions Club made up mostly of doctors, nurses, and other members of the medical staff at Chicago’s Norwegian-American Hospital, where he is chairman of the board of trustees.

The Norwegian-American Century Lions Club is prototypical of a new kind of organization that Lions executives want to encourage: close-knit organizations organized around particular institutions, such as colleges, corporations, and medical centers. Part of the goal is to gear club meeting times and locations to the schedules of employees and to shape service projects to their professional expertise.

That’s the idea at the Norwegian-American club, which was organized five years ago and has 110 members. Not only does the club send local youngsters to a youth camp each year and help sponsor a health fair in the hospital’s blue-collar neighborhood, but it also runs medical missions in other countries, such as Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, and the Philippines.

“By working together,” says Alfredo Sy, a family-medicine specialist and club president, “we can accomplish more than we can individually.”

Besides reaching out to people at the places where they work, clubs also are trying to build ties to young people through their youth arms — organizations like Lions’ Leo Clubs, Kiwanis’ Builders, Key, and Circle K Clubs, and Rotary’s Interact and Rotaract groups.

But converting those youngsters into full-fledged service-club membership can be a challenge.

Mr. Williams, the spokesman for Kiwanis, says that his organization never pushed Key and Circle K Clubs “as a farm team for Kiwanis” but that executives are discussing the issue in a new light.

“There is very much talk right now that, ‘Hey, we’ve got 190,000 Key Club members. Let’s really start selling them on some day joining Kiwanis,’ ” he says.

In other ways, too, the service clubs are moving to enter the new millennium on a stronger footing.

The Lions’ executive administrator, Win Hamilton, cites an array of strategic issues that his organization is studying. High on the list is improving member services through enhancements of the Lions’ World-Wide Web site. Lions also wants to start more clubs in towns that don’t have one. In addition, the group has produced a video that urges students to volunteer for community service.

At Kiwanis, top leaders are searching for ways to set up “family-friendly clubs” that offer activities for spouses and children of Kiwanians and give them ways to participate in club projects.

Kiwanis executives have even talked about starting a cyberspace club, Mr. Williams notes.

But in the service-club world, turning such ideas into reality can take a while.

“In the last few years I’ve heard the phrase, ‘a new kind of Kiwanis Club,’ ” Mr. Williams says. “I keep telling everyone, ‘I’m waiting to see one.’”