The Rotary Speakers Exchange: Find speakers for your meetings or offer your own presentations

Please read the following rules:

1. The presentations are to be offered free of charge and without any other consideration.
2. They should also not be associated with any sales activities. Company presentations or presentations of a promotional nature are not permitted. However, if you offer a general technical presentation from your professional perspective, this is fine.
3. Rotary is non-partisan and non-religious. This must be respected in the presentations.
4. We reserve the right to remove presentations from the list without prior warning or not to include them at all. There is no entitlement to inclusion.

The image should be an illustration of your topic in the editorial sense. In other words, it should not be the title slide of a PowerPoint presentation. It must not contain any artificial text overlays, for example. If text is part of the photo, then this is fine in many cases. Just ask yourself: Would a newspaper illustrate an editorial article on my topic with this motif?

We would like to say in advance that we are not lawyers and are therefore not permitted to give legal advice. However, we would like to share the following experience with you: An image that you find on any website is in the vast majority of cases not suitable for use as your cover image. Even if, for example, an initiative that you are reporting on publishes the image on its website and you can assume that your presentation is in the spirit of the initiative, this does not mean that you can simply use an image of it. A good source for images that may be used in many cases is Wikipedia. There, too, you must check which terms of use – such as the obligation to provide precise source information – you must comply with. Even if you have taken a picture yourself, you may not be allowed to use it just like that. There are other rights that must be observed, such as the right to your own image or the rights of the place where the image was taken. We will be happy to give you our non-binding assessment of your images based on our experience, or we can license an image from an image archive at cost price. By the way: If you have licensed an image in an archive yourself, in many cases you may not pass it on for use by third parties. The license terms are often strict and require each user to relicense the image. This is because you are not buying the image, but a license to use it.

No. We do not have the resources to read the license terms of image archives or to contact copyright holders. Our website is a free, voluntarily created and maintained offer from the Rotary family for the Rotary family. We therefore need your cooperation in creating attractive presentations for the benefit of everyone involved.

The idea for the speaker exchange came in March 2020 from the then district governor of district 1930, Jan Mittelstaedt from RC Konstanz-Mainau. He initially set up the exchange for his district and expanded it to the whole German-speaking region in collaboration with his son Jannik Mittelstaedt, a member of RAC Konstanz-Kreuzlingen and of RC Urlaub für Kinder.

The website was deliberately created according to the Pareto principle: 20 percent of the possible functions fulfill 80 percent of the users’ wishes. We want to keep it that simple. If the number of presentations becomes too large – which would be great – we would first work on the presentation of the categories.

The main reason for this is that speakers no longer have time to give the presentations or are overwhelmed by the number of requests for appointments. In this case, we suggest including restrictions on availability – for example, only for evening meetings – directly in the offers. At the same time, we ask the clubs for their understanding if in some cases a lecture cannot be held promptly, but only in a few months’ time.