While most of our Officers attended training on June 28th, I attended on July 12th. So I didn’t get to share notes with everyone. However, I took some notes on the ideas presented and felt these were ones that should be shared with membership.
1. President’s Distinguished Club: This is a great program for ensuring that the club is being responsive to Toastmaster’s International and their mission for the organization. But as club officers it’s our job to ensure that we keep an eye on the mission and goals of the individual members. To maintain a vibrant club where our members are achieving their goals needs to be very high on the list of club priorities.
2. We are approaching our Fall speech contests (Tall Tales and Humor). We should be looking for ways to publicize this event to draw attention and possibly new members. We can also make manual completions and other events into news articles for local publication.
3. Membership contest idea: The District will have four membership contests this year (see the District50Toastmaster.org site for more details). We might divide the membership into teams of four to six people and have a competition within the club, with suitable rewards for “most” or “quota achievement”.
4. Another way to get more members is to make each meeting so much fun that all the members go to work and talk about it. Others may get the good idea to visit us.
5. Our club meeting need to be seen as a safe place to practice presentations we make as a part of our working life. Even if you use only the opening of your presentation as a Toastmaster speech, you get to practice and get feedback (evaluation).
6. Remember that Evaluation includes both “I liked ….” and “I thought you could have done _____ better.”
7. Invite someone “interesting” to the club to make a speech and then publicize it to draw prospective members.
8. Ours is not a company-sponsored club but that doesn’t mean that you can’t invite people from your company. Try saying,” Hi Joe, I’m making a speech about ____ and I know you have an interest in that. Will you join me at Toastmasters?” Another idea is to invite your boss to come and see you when you make a speech that completes a manual.
I encourage any member who wants more ideas on Toastmasters to attend any of the District Officer Trainings. They have sessions for Officers, of course. But they also have other sessions, such as: “Advanced Officers (working as a Team for club success); “A Holistic Approach to Effective TM Meetings”; “The Long and SHort of Tall Tales”; “Masterful Contest Master Training”; and “Using Stories for Influential Speeches.”
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