How to make the most of Polaris to accomplish various club tasks

Basic prerequisites:

1. The most important prerequisite is the willingness to collaborate digitally. If the club intends to manage work with scattered tools such as e-mail, Excel, Word and PDF, it doesn't need Polaris.
2. The second essential condition is that the majority of members have activated their connection. Most of the information cannot be made public, for data protection reasons, as it contains personal information. Access is therefore only possible with a login. Polaris can only be used effectively if more than 95% of members have an e-mail address and use it.
3. Polaris should be implemented in stages. The club itself decides on the extent of these steps and the speed of their introduction. Using all Polaris features at once is too much of a burden for every club and every user.
   
4. It must be clear at club level who is providing support and who is the next instance. Help must be provided internally and quickly in the first instance. An upset user can't help himself; he needs support. See Polaris Support.

Calendar

The first and most important step towards better communication within the club is the use of the calendar for all club events.

The program manager enters all events in the calendar. The essentials on the life cycle of an event are explained in the FAQs.

• Pay attention to visibility and respect the Publication Rules.
  
• Be sure to differentiate between statutory meetings and other events (otherwise, attendance entry will not work properly).
• E-mail invitations are only used for the most important club events.
  
• It is recommended to systematically activate registration to facilitate the task of the organizers (availability, restaurant, tickets, etc.).
• If documents are required for the event (agenda, last minutes, letter, etc.), they are added directly to the event. They can still be accessed using the search function, if they have been saved in the corresponding Documents folder (link to be copied and placed in the event, rather than downloaded from an external file).
  

Attendance capture is event-dependent, and only works if events are activated and participants are registered.

Other Calendar-related features

• Use related questions to add details to registration.
• Integrate restaurant.
  
• Capture attendance by scanning QR code (see chapter 4).
• Activate the Finance module to automatically debit the price of the meal when confirming attendance.
  

Bulletin/Weekly report

Creating, distributing and filing weekly bulletins/reports is a tradition in most Rotary clubs. A weekly bulletin/report provides information on the club's events over the past week. 

The uninterrupted preservation of bulletins over many years is very important to clubs. It allows them to document their history. 

• The editing of the weekly bulletin/report is the responsibility of the bulletin editor. 

On Polaris, weekly bulletins/reports should be distributed via Newsletters, which offer the possibility of communicating both past and future events, by adding links to other club publications: meeting minutes directly registered in the passed event, upcoming events, past or future projects, etc. ... The newsletter is sent by e-mail and published simultaneously on the club's website. Unlike e-mails, newsletters are always visible on the club website.

Another option for storing the weekly event bulletin/report is to save a Word or pdf document in a specific folder created in the Documents directory. This variant looks simpler, but requires the link to be e-mailed to members for downloading. For clubs that continue to send documents by post, this is an option. However, it complicates the secretary's work.