Accelerating Digital Transformation for a Global Non-Profit Organization: Rotary International

• Product Research & Development

Rotary International, a global non-profit organization, was facing challenges in keeping up with the rapid pace of digital change and the increasing digital expectations of its members. Despite its focus on global humanitarian and youth leadership development programs, the organization realized that it was falling behind in delivering relevant and reliable digital products. The organization recognized the need to rethink how its digital strategy supported its mission and how it delivered digital products that better focused on evolving member expectations. The challenge was to find a way to leverage digital technologies to enhance member engagement and support the organization's mission.

Rotary International

Rotary International is a global, not-for-profit membership organization founded in 1905. It brings together business and professional leaders to provide humanitarian services and advance goodwill and peace around the world. The organization has 1.2 million members, represented by more than 36,000 local clubs. Rotary's members have been instrumental in the fight to eradicate polio and its worldwide youth programs are developing the next generation of service-minded community leaders. The organization partners with entities such as UNICEF, the Gates Foundation, and USAID to extend the humanitarian reach of their members on a global scale. Rotary's current activities are focused on disease prevention, literacy, and bringing clean water to the developing world, among others.

To address these challenges, Rotary International engaged SoftServe to lead them through a Digital Strategy Transformation. The process began with a series of triage efforts to stabilize their key member support products, allowing the organization to better focus on problem framing and ideation. SoftServe then led Rotary through a Digital Maturity Assessment, identifying specific people, process, and technology issues that required attention and evaluating the organization's capacity for transformative change. The findings from this assessment led to a focused, four-month, comprehensive, and multidisciplinary Digital Strategy Transformation engagement. This engagement was designed specifically to help Rotary evolve into a truly member-focused and digitally enabled organization. The collaboration resulted in the development of a comprehensive Digital Strategy Transformation Playbook, which redefined how digital product development would work in the future and introduced a comprehensive restructuring of the organization.

• The collaboration between Rotary and SoftServe led to significant operational changes. The Digital Strategy Transformation Playbook introduced a comprehensive restructuring of the organization, redefining roles and responsibilities for key contributors to the digital processes. It also established clear definitions of digital products and provided a roadmap for establishing teams and skills to implement, innovate, and thrive in a digital-first world. A new function focused on strategic Customer 360 concepts was introduced, drawing on Rotary’s established functions in research and business intelligence and coupling them with new focuses on member experiences and service design. This created a service organization to support not only digital experiences but also all of Rotary’s real-world membership community and their humanitarian and service missions.