Polaris 2025: Exciting innovations await you

The year 2025 brings lots of exciting updates for Polaris! You can look forward to new features, optimized functions and even simpler operation that will make club management even easier.

With innovative tools, improved interfaces and helpful training offers, we want to further develop Polaris together with you and shape the digital future of Rotary clubs. Stay tuned - it's worth it!

Your Polaris team

2025: Outlook

NEWS

New user statistics available

User login statistics | December 2024

Here you will find the link to the current user statistics for your country. If you do not have access, please ask your DICO to download the file for you.

Please take a look at the figures of your club or district and support your friends who have not yet logged in to Polaris or have not done so for some time. Thank you very much!

Online payment with Payrexx

Online payment option to be launched in Polaris from February 2025

Online payment is an optional Polaris feature for any club, district or other organization, such as Foundations or Fellowships. It offers numerous advantages, such as:

+ Advance payment when registering for the event

Better planning and easier event management for the organizer.

+ Participation without direct payment on site

Fast admission for registered participants.

+ No link with the Polaris finance module

Online payment is intended for large events, the existing finance module for weekly lunches.

+ Organize fundraising campaigns

Create your own donation pages with direct cash collection and payment to the club bank account.

+ Selling merchandising items or products from the club

Creating your own e-shop pages for easier sales.

+ And many new possibilities that are still to come

Polaris will be further expanded at this point, e.g. payment of annual club fees, etc.

As soon as it is possible for clubs to register for the activation of the online payment option, all clubs will be informed individually.

The use of these new functions is free of charge for clubs – only the usual transaction fees for online payments apply.

The following developments are currently planned

SEMDA 3.0

In the past, many club management systems (Local CMS) have been developed for Rotary clubs. The management of membership and club data is always an integral part of such a system. However, all Rotary organizations are part of the worldwide organization Rotary International (RI) and thus RI's IT system is the root and master of all club and member data. Clubs must either manage their membership data in the RI system (MyRotary) or synchronize the data between the local CMS and RI to keep both systems up to date.

The effort involved in manually maintaining data in two places is enormous. Many errors also result from such a procedure. For this reason, an automated synchronization service called SEMDA was developed and introduced in Sweden a few years ago. SEMDA 2.0 currently uses the RI interface (RI API) and enables data synchronization between several local CMS and the RI system.

The demand for new functions and technological innovation requires a new development of the software. SEMDA 3.0 is a completely new product that has been developed from scratch. On September 1, 2023, RCS (Rotary Communication Services = Polaris) took over ownership of the SEMDA product and its name.

The goals of SEMDA 3.0 and the differences to the current version are summarized here.

The changeover to SEMDA 3.0 is planned for mid-2025.

You can find more detailed technical information here.

Flexible recipient lists

Flexible recipient lists facilitate communication

The current recipient groups only partially fulfill the desired purpose. In practice, more flexible combinations of recipients (members) are required for sending information.

For this reason, more flexible recipient lists can be created in future (planned for Q2 2025). These lists can be created by entering various filter criteria and used directly when sending newsletters or emails. If you want to use this list again at a later date, it can be saved as a static recipient group.

The currently predefined dynamic or static recipient groups remain in place (it is planned to reduce the list of predefined recipient groups slightly) and can be used when creating the required recipient lists. Dynamic lists are converted into a static list when they are added.

New registration option for "invited persons" only

Events: Registration option for "invited persons" only

There is often a need to enable registration for events for a defined group of participants only. This option should be available in Q2 2025.

The desired participants are added to the event and the event itself is marked with a corresponding registration option. In future, the flexible distribution lists will also be available for selecting the desired participants.