Apprentice 2021: Volunteering at the Rotary Club

Published on October 4, 2021 by Alex Eade

This month’s Apprentice Challenge started at the crack of dawn, with a team breakfast and Tom B providing a brief for the day…

We learnt that we would be volunteering at the Rotary Club in Colchester, and then using our digital marketing know how to present three different pitches for how the club could widen their membership – the team with the best pitch would win the challenge!

First up, volunteering. We divided into our three teams and got down to work. Baker’s Dozen were first up with fence painting, whilst Scan the Team who Can were on litter picking duty and Shaak to the Future started weeding the children’s play area. Each team took on a task for 45 minutes before swapping with another team.

A few hours later, and we had managed to collect nine bags of litter from surrounding fields, two bags of weeds from the children’s play area, and finish painting the fence – not bad for a morning’s work!

Whilst all of this was going on, we used the time to discuss our pitches and ideas that we had for expanding the Rotary Club’s reach. Each team had to focus on a different target audience and think about why they might want to become a member. Rosie’s team focused on Army Veterans, Mike’s on Gen Z, and Shaak’s on corporates and business people.

Still thinking about our pitches, we headed off to The Wooden Fender in Ardleigh for a pub lunch followed by a quiz. The quiz was in two parts, and teams swapped papers to mark to ensure no cheating in the ranks! In the end, Shaak to the Future just pipped Baker’s Dozen to the post to win with 11 points out of 12 and take home the coveted prize of a bottle of Prosecco.

Next up were those all important pitches. We had half an hour in our groups to decide our final points, put them all in an email to Tom B, and shoot a quick video to support our pitch. It was quite a rush to get everything finished before J, Ed, and Mike took to the stage to share their team’s respective ideas.

After a fantastic (if slightly long) speech from Mike, his team were named worthy winners of the second Apprentice Challenge in this series (and another bottle of Prosecco). That means that the scores are currently even, with one point per team.

May the best team win next time!