Rotaract Royale for CWI - What We Learned

Good afternoon everyone, we wanted to reflect a little on our Poker event that we held Friday night via Zoom & PokerStars. With COVID-19 limiting our ability to hold in-person/traditional fundraisers, we knew we had to adapt our fundraising efforts as fast as possible to keep up with these changing times. About mid-march our schools were closed and classes were moved online, work was being done at home and most places in the community were shut down. With that being said we had to move our meetings online. It was quite different, though nothing beats in person interaction, we are slowly getting used to our Zoom meetings. Once we started our online meetings we worked at trying to find some online fundraising ideas. This proved a little more difficult than expected since everyone is now doing online events. We see fundraiser such as Trivia, JackBox game nights and Bingos, so finding something more unique in an ever saturated market was tough.

A few weeks prior to our poker night someone suggested the idea of Poker. It was something we haven’t seen any other club do and some of our members already had experience with the software. It took less than 3 weeks for us to complete this event from start to finish (which I’m told is a Rotaract Ottawa record! Go us!). We chose to support CWI Ottawa (COVID-19 Women’s Initiative) since a few of our members were already volunteering with them we had some connections there. CWI which supports various women’s shelters in these challenging times, was very grateful for our support and even helped us advertise the event.

Looking back on Friday nights event, it was more successful than we had imagined, with a final donation total of $553.50!! Everyone who attended raved about how much fun it was and would love to do it again, even those who have never played poker before! So with that, we are proud to announce that we will be hosting Bi-Weekly Rotaract Royale tournaments. So join us on the 1st and 3rd Friday of the month to play some poker or just socialize on our Zoom call. More details here.

We are forever grateful for your ongoing support, and hope to see you next Friday (June 5th) for our next poker night,

Rotaract Ottawa