Speaker Resources
Thank you for joining us at the Rotary Club of Tulsa. Of the 33,000 Rotary Clubs around the world, the Rotary Club of Tulsa is one of the largest with more than 460 members. You will be speaking to the top business professionals of Tulsa.
Please make note of the following speaker and presentation guidelines, and give us a call at (918) 584-7642 if you have any questions.
- Send a summary of your biography/resume and a paragraph about the subject of your presentation as soon as your date has been booked to: tom@rexpr.com and jane@tulsarotary.com so that we may promote your speaking engagement on our website.
- Monday afternoon prior to your speaking engagement, send all AV requests and slides/PowerPoint to: sperkins@hogantaylor.com. Please note: (a) If you are using a PowerPoint presentation, it should contain mostly photos. The room is 100' deep and participants in the back cannot read words on PowerPoint slides smaller than 44-point. (b) We can also accommodate: DVDs, VCR tapes, Media Files, PowerPoint, and Live Camera Feed.
- On your speaking day, please arrive no later than 11:30 am for lunch. The meeting begins at 12:10 pm with an invocation, song, pledge and announcements. You will be introduced by the Rotarian of the Day. Please plan your talk for about 20 minutes. If time permits, some Q&A is welcome. The meeting ends at 1 pm.
For more information on the Rotary Club of Tulsa, please explore this website. Our online magazine, GasserOnline, can be accessed from our main site, or by visiting www.gasseronline.org
A PDF version of these guidelines, along with a map to our meeting location, may be downloaded HERE.
Rotary Club of Tulsa Policies and Practices as stated in the Barhydt Letter:
Programs
1.) It is the policy of the Club to refrain from programs of a political nature. In recent years we have served as a neutral forum for occasional debates of political issues.
2.) Speakers are asked to refrain from "sales pitches" and distribution of printed matter about their product or point of view. We do allow national speakers to sell books at a side table, as a way of off-setting their travel/speaking expenses, since we do not pay a speaker's fee. In these instances, the speaker is encouraged to donate a portion of each sale to the Rotary Club of Tulsa Foundation.
3.) Article IX, Section 1 of the Rotary Constitution provides that Rotary Clubs shall not express an opinion on any pending controversial public measure. As mentioned above, we often serve as a forum for informative debates on pending legislation or controversial political issues. However, we do not take sides, and we do not support particular political points of view. As a caution, this rule becomes difficult to follow when school bond issues and other local tax matters come up for vote and the Club is pressured through its own members to make announcements urging members to vote for or against a particular issue. In recent years the Board and the President have been quite firm in limiting such matters to announcing the date of a particular election and urging members to vote, while refraining from urging a particular point of view in the election. (LE 1996)
4.) Campaigning:
Rotary is a politically neutral organization. No candidate for public office shall be, knowingly, invited as a guest speaker of the Rotary Club of Tulsa within one year prior to his or her election date, except for a debate or forum to which the other leading candidates are invited. All members seeking a political office should refrain from campaigning for office while attending a Rotary meeting. Guests of Rotary members, desiring to hold public office, should be cautioned against campaigning while attending a Rotary meeting. (Adopted December 2, 1996)
5.) Solicitations:
The Rotary Club of Tulsa has a standing policy, established by the Board of Directors, that no outside group(s) is allowed to make announcements or solicitations of any type at a regular meeting, unless specifically approved by the Board. This includes handouts, items put out on tables, display items in the foyer or outside the entrance, and personal solicitations or announcements from the podium.
The Board recognizes that in some instances our invited speaker may, in an indirect manner, be promoting his or her organization's services or products during the normal presentation of the topic. However, speakers will not be allowed to make direct solicitations for funds or products sales, except as noted in Item 2. (Adopted December 2, 1996)
Invocations
At any given meeting our audience is comprised of many different faiths and religious beliefs, and all persons attending our meetings must feel welcome. It is a Rotary tradition to include an invocation as part of the opening ceremonies. Invocations that use language specific to a particular faith or religious belief exclude persons of other faiths and can be divisive. Accordingly, a person invited to give an invocation should agree to these guidelines:
- a) Invocations should be carefully planned in advance.
- b) Invocations should be general and inclusive. For more information, consult the pamphlet published by the National Conference for Community and Justice (NCCJ) titled "When You are Asked to Give Public Prayer in a Diverse Society - Guidelines for Civic Occasions." NCCJ defines "inclusive prayer" as prayer that is "nonsectarian, general and carefully planned to avoid embarrassments and misunderstandings, authentic prayer that also enables people to recognize the pluralism of American society, respectful of the composition of the audience and easily shared by listeners from different faiths and traditions."
- c) Invocations should not be used to preach or give testimony.
If unwilling to comply with these guidelines, the individual's position should be respected, and he or she should be given the opportunity to decline the invitation to lead the invocation. (Adopted March 8, 2010)
