Rotary makes the world a better place, Okta gives them the tools to do it

Peter Markos: Rotary International is a global service organisation. We're made up of 34,000 clubs in over 220 countries and over 1.2 million members.

Our corporate mission is to eradicate Polio but that's not the only thing we're involved in. We also do a lot of other community projects. The key things is Rotarians make a difference in the world. We call it doing good.

My role is I'm responsible for all the technology needs of the organisation, both here in the states and globally.

One of the ways we help our members be efficient is we provide an array of services through our website Rotary.org. We have a wealth of content and information about how to run an effective club, an effective meeting. We've got information about grants. We also have very interactive tools, things such as Rotary Club Central, that allow a club to set strategic goals and then measure their progress against them, both in membership growth and in fundraising.

We have an online grant application system. We have an eLearning offering that's out in the cloud. One of the things we're really looking to do is make the access to these applications as simple and easy for our members to get to as possible. That's one of the reasons we ultimately chose Okta is it really simplifies that experience significantly.

As we look at the wealth of tools that we're making available to our Rotarians, most of the access within the applications that we have is very much driven upon who you are and what you're role is within a club. Identity's at the core of what we provide to you. We need to know who you are and we also need to know when you are that role because the other great thing about Rotary is that leadership at a club level changes annually.

We looked at, I think it's OneLogin, we looked at Simplified, and the truth is, when we looked at the models, it seemed like Okta had the best approach for what it is that we needed. They had a more complete vision managing identity and the integration on the single sign in approach that they were following was very consistent with what we needed to have happening in the coming years for our external user base. It was not a very internally focused only vision. They really were looking at a broad spectrum of how to approach this use case, and I think they did a really good job with it.

We're now using Okta for authentication so we know who our members are and are they able to successfully log in. We're also integrating them with our CRM so that we know what role they are and also when they're that role, because again they change positions every year.

That's the future for Rotary. In essence, we're crowd-sourcing application functionality and what Okta's helping us do is lower barriers to adoption by making it easy for your every day Rotarian to go, "I know how to get into this new functionality. I just use my same ID and password." They get right to the good stuff and the value as opposed to having the hurdles to jump through.

We had some challenges in the implementation of getting this all to work right. I give Okta a lot of credit, frankly. When we called and we had an issue and we needed a resolution, you guys responded great. That's the way we measure partnership is response to the tough times. I think you guys came through with flying colours because you really delivered what we needed, when we needed it.