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Rotary Down Under Nov 2021
By RDU Editorial
MAXIMISE YOUR IMPACT
“No matter how you crunch the numbers, no other charity can match the way The Rotary Foundation empowers the ingenious Rotarians of Zone 8 to do good in the world.”
When you donate to The Rotary Foundation’s Annual Fund, your contribution disappears overseas, right? Wrong!
In fact, it’s invested for three years (earning excellent returns) and then becomes available for Rotarians to fund high-impact projects. The good news is that Rotarians ‘Down Under’ are particularly ingenious when it comes to devising and implementing high-impact projects.
However, that’s not where the good news ends. Let’s say you identify an opportunity to run a project that will transform educational outcomes for disadvantaged kids in your community. The problem is that it requires an investment of $100,000 and your club can only raise $10,000.
You decide to apply for a global grant from the Foundation and your district agrees to match your $10K contribution with the same amount in District Designated Funds (DDF is the Annual Fund contributions that come back to your district after being invested for three years).
Then, six other clubs get inspired by your project and contribute a total of $18,000, and three more districts come on board with $30,000 in DDF. Now you’re up to $68,000. Next, TRF approves a $32,000 global grant from the World Fund.
With $100,000 from all these sources, you’ve now multiplied your club’s $10,000 fundraising by a factor of 10 and delivered a high-impact local project. We call it the Project Impact Multiplier.
That’s the club perspective. What happens if we look at this from the point of view of a donor?
In 2017-18, the amount contributed to the Annual Fund by clubs, members, and other donors in Zone 8 (Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands) was $3.99 million.
Three years later, in 2020-21, Zone 8 clubs and districts received grant funding of:
- $1.7 million from the World Fund,
- $2 million as DDF to fund district grants, global grants, etc., and
- $4.3 million in support of Zone 8 grants from districts, clubs and individuals outside the zone.
- That’s a total of $8.01 million. In other words, each $100 contributed by a local donor has turned into $202 in funding for Zone 8 projects – a Donor Impact Multiplier of 2.02.
