Once you know your lineup of officers, the following are the upcoming officer training dates:

• Saturday, December 6th - District TLI in San Marcos (flier on the Resources page)
• Saturday, January 10th probably at the Unity Center
• Wednesday, January 21st
• Thursday, January 29th

Encourage your club officers to save at least one of these dates on their calenders.

Your best bet is to attend the TLI. That would give new officers the chance to get trained BEFORE they actually take office (what a novel idea!).

Congratulations Speechmasters! Here’s to another 10 great years!

If anyone else has a celebration they’d like announced, let us know.

Other than the fantastic educational sessions and contests we have lined up there’s a special promotion:

Any club that can get 5 members there with either a full registration or an education and contests registration will earn a World Champion Speaker DVD valued at up to $20. Here’s one example.

So if you haven’t done so already, go register for the conference and invite your fellow members from your club.

All the details are here: http://toastmastersinaustin.info/conference/.

[EDIT 9/24: The district website is now up and running. Both pages are identical but the official one is www.tmd55.org/conference/. It hadn't been working when I wrote this post.]

This post is going to focus specifically on getting more guests. If a club doesn’t have the systems in place to convert guests to members that’s another issue. In fact, if you have more than 25 members, you should probably be focusing more on club quality than quantity. Yes, get your 8 new members each year but see to it that as many of those new members get their CCs and CLs as possible.

Getting more guests is more or less the same as getting more customers to a business or more traffic to a website. The idea is to make sure that you’re offering a real value and people know you’re out there. With the Toastmasters brand, the value is mostly covered. The task then becomes communicating that value so that people will hear about you and pay attention.

The next step is to figure out how many guests you want. If you just want one or two, you’re probably okay passively waiting for people to find you through your website (you have one, right?). Or maybe you can promote a word of mouth membership campaign in your club.

If you’re a club less than charter strength (20), you ought to at least go for that. The reason one of the distinguished club goals (DCP) is to get 8 new members a year is that’s the average attrition for a charter strength club. So you’d probably want to go for 25 or more members so you don’t fall below charter strength again.

If you’re looking for more than a couple of guests, here are some strategies:

• Have a special meeting (open house, guest speaker, etc) and promote it outside the club
• Hold a Speechcraft (basically an intro to Toastmasters multi-week course for the public)
• Distribute Toastmasters magazines or club newsletters with your contact info on them
• Put out fliers at local establishments
• Go talk to HR people at nearby companies (or your own if you’re a corporate club)
• Promote contests or other events
• Attend networking/business events
• Send press releases or calender listings to local newspapers
• Start an ezine with helpful communication and leadership tips
• Look for ways to take advantage of social networking opportunities
• If parking is an issue, look for guests from companies within walking distance
• Brainstorm more ideas with your membership (there’s nothing like ownership to light a fire)

District and TI have a few resources to help too.

• If your club has less than 12 members, you’re eligible to get a club coach.
• TI has a manual How to Rebuild a Toastmasters Club.
• If you’re not familiar with any of the above programs, a district officer can help explain them.

At one of the officer trainings, Steve Lockwood presented a plan that was used by a club to go from 8 members to 24 in 6 months. It cites District 21 as having received it from a club in District 4. Here’s how that one went:

Scenario:

• The club had only 8 members. Four of them were new to TM.
• Club morale was low. Members were busy with no extra time for the club.
• Sound hopeless?

Solution:

• Club members committed to a Six Point Plan which involved every member in publicizing and promoting the club.
• The goal was to achieve maximum results with minimal resources.
• Six members committed to complete one project each.
• Each project involved two hours of work per month.
• The seventh member, VP Membership, oriented guests who came to the club.
• The eighth member coordinated the effort.

The Six Projects in the Six Point Plan:

1. One of the new members posts fliers once a month in the community.
2. Another new member submits calender listings once a month to local newspapers.
3. Another new member (halfway to their CC) organized a demonstration meeting 4 weeks in advance and personally invited every former member and guest.
4. An experienced member coordinated a Speechcraft over 4 weeks.
5. Another experienced member wrote a 5 part series on Toastmasters for a local health and fitness organization (Communication Skills, Self Expression, Building Self Confidence, Overcoming Fear, and Leadership).
6. Another experienced member did monthly presentations for 3-5 local companies on “How Toastmasters Can Benefit Your Business.”

The point here is that you can get results if you band together with your club members and execute a plan everyone is enthusiastic about.

Incidentally, I checked the DCP reports for the last 5 years for the club cited for that 6 point plan. They’ve been fluctuating between 14-17 members the whole time and are currently at 14. I guess they could use another plan.

My personal opinion is that if you’re down to 6-8 members with 2-5 attending and no one really cares anymore, it’s okay to close the club. Of course it hurts district stats but it can give Toastmasters a bad name to have clubs like that. Either decide to be a solid club or go find something more valuable to do with your time. Don’t get complacent in mediocrity.

If you have any other ideas on how to get guests (not necessarily on converting them to members per se), please leave a comment.

For this post, I’m going to cover domain names, Free Toast Host (FTH), the top 5 Toastmasters websites in Austin (according to Google searching the terms “Austin toastmasters” and “toastmasters Austin”). And then I’ll cover some other online resources available to Toastmasters clubs.

Domain Names

Out of about 75 clubs in Austin 35 have websites listed on the district site. Of those, 20 have Free Toast Host (FTH) domain names. Since so few clubs have their own domain name, I’m going to list them:

• http://www.austintoastmasters.org/
• http://www.capital-city-toastmasters.org/
• http://balconestoastmasters.org/
• http://www.oakhilltoastmasters.org/
• http://www.ut-toast.com/
• http://www.aimhightoastmasters.org/

Not surprisingly, the first 3 listed above are among the top Google search results. They also had some of the largest numbers of new members last year.

Having your own domain name makes a difference. If you’re an open club, you’re shooting yourself in the foot by not having one. If you’re a closed club, then it may not matter that much because you won’t have nearly as much web based marketing.

Domain names usually cost around $8-$10 per year. Believe me it’s worth it. I actually got this one on sale (toastmastersinaustin.info) for $2 for the first year. If you have a FTH domain name and want to transfer it to your own, go to your administration page and use the find tool (CTRL + F for PCs) and find “Use Custom Domain Name.” There’s a paragraph there telling you exactly how to set it up.

Free Toast Host

If you’re one of those clubs who don’t have a website, why not? FTH is free. All it takes is a little time to set up. You could get CL credit as a PR campaign if you get someone to help you. It will definitely help your club PR in the long run.

If you need a site, go to this page: http://www.freetoasthost.org/membershipinfo.html

FTH is easy. There’s no programming or coding to do. If you can manage a Word Document, you can handle this. There’s only one administration page and everything is explained there. If you have more questions, FTH has a FAQ on their site. I’ve also found their technical support to be helpful the one time we had a hangup with the email system.

There’s one feature every club ought to take advantage of… the duty roster. Using the duty roster the VPE gets a turnkey solution to scheduling. It’s very customizable and keeps a record for you. If your club allows people to sign up on their own, it’s perfect for that. If your VPE creates the schedule manually, there’s another tool, Club Scheduler, that works with FTH and automates that process too. I think they ask for a $40 donation if you club can manage. The full list of tools is on the TI site.

As a former VPE myself, I can guarantee you that your VPE has more than enough to do without trying to create and control the only copy of the schedule. Do you have a mentoring program? Does everyone in you club know what the CL manual is?

Top 5 Austin Club Websites

http://www.austintoastmasters.org/

Austin Toastmasters probably has the most thorough website out there. That’s why they rank #1. No doubt having “Austin” and “Toastmasters” in their domain name doesn’t help either. They do an excellent job talking about what makes them unique as well as featuring their members. They have somewhere approaching 100 of their speeches posted on YouTube. They’re not using FTH at all. I believe they handle the scheduling of their 5 speakers per meeting by hand. They’re so thorough that they even have one of those mind numbingly long privacy statements.

http://www.capital-city-toastmasters.org/

Capital City Toastmasters is usually ranked #2 on Google. What I tell you here will be a little biased since I helped build it but here goes anyway. Our site uses two platforms… FTH for membership and agenda management and WordPress for content management. When you go to the site, what you’re seeing is from WordPress. The outer WordPress platform is linked to the same FTH links so that it’s completely customizable. Google (and visitors) likes fresh content. We post our weekly meeting recaps there as blog posts. Once we set it all up, it’s super easy to maintain and can be done by any of several officers that know how to do it. We’re in the process of setting up dues payments through the site as well. One area governor asked if we actually do everything described on the site. Yes, we do.

http://balconestoastmasters.org/

Balcones Toastmasters have started using a wiki for their website. Since wikis are mostly for collaborative information sharing (not marketing), it’s very functional but not so pretty. If you click around on the navigation bar, you’ll find a very complete record of their minutes among other things. The members link is password protected so they may be using FTH. They have the agenda posted in the public pages so I’m not sure what they’d be using it for.

http://westaustin2.freetoasthost.com/

West Austin II along with Balcones are two of the leading breakfast clubs in Austin. Their site is a pretty good example of personalizing a FTH site. They have a few links to their speeches on YouTube and talk about why someone would want to join their club on the front page. As of this writing, they have fresh content on the front page too.

http://home.austin.rr.com/toastmasters/

Well you can’t tell from the domain name but this is West Austin I. If you click around, you’ll see that it hasn’t been updated since February 2006. If I were a visitor to this site, I’d be wondering if this club is still meeting. It just goes to show that it’s not that much work to get your site to rank well. If anyone from West Austin I sees this, I’d recommend the basic upgrades of going to FTH and getting your own domain name.

Videos

If you’ve looked at the above sites, you probably realize that YouTube is a good way to post your videos. It’s free and you can post clips up to 10 minutes long. You don’t have to put the person’s name if they don’t want to show up on a Google search. If they don’t want the rest of the world to even see them, you can post it privately. If you do that, only people you send an invitation to can see it.

Alternately, if you want to send the video directly to the person you can use a free file sharing site like Drop.io. I just heard about them through a list of good sites in PC Magazine.

If you don’t have a video camera, I recommend the Flip Camcorder. It’s about $125. I’ve been using one for a while now and saw another one being used at the Spring Conference.

Privacy

It’s up to your club whether you post people’s full names or not. Austin Toastmasters doesn’t. Capital City does. If someone wants to find out about you on Google, showing up on a Toastmasters website probably isn’t going to be a make or break situation for you as long as you aren’t posting videos of you talking about something potentially embarrassing.

Summary

No one has any excuses not to have a website now. If you’re looking for more members, one will help you. If you’re looking for a way to make club operations easier, one will help you. You can have a solid site for free. You can have a stellar site for a few bucks and some elbow grease.

Decide what you want your website to be about. Is it a marketing piece? Is it for internal communications? Is it a little of both? There’s a way for you somewhere out there. Get to it.

Feel free to ask questions or leave other comments below.

Most clubs could use a full month to get it together. The first week they’ll announce it. The second, a few will remember and then you still have a couple of weeks to follow up with those who forgot.

They’ll get more points for the Jack Rabbit Dash if they can turn in their dues by September 15th.

If they’re a corporate club and the corporation pays some part of the dues, they may need a little more time to request the check, etc.

Lessons From Ron Lewison (1938-2008)

If they want to see the rules or judging forms for Tall Tales, we have them posted on our resources page.

We also have a DEC meeting coming up in about a week. At that time, we’ll want to finalize all the area contest dates. If you’re an AG, you’ll want to figure out how many of your clubs are competing in the next week so you’ll know if it would make sense for you to plan a contest together with another area.

We were discussing evaluations and judging recently. It was suggested that we might increase participation in the contests if we make a point about judging.

Having judged well over 20 contests in the past couple of years, I’ve overheard a variety of responses from contestants after the fact. Many take it as well as could be expected. Sometimes some folks feel like the judging was biased or that they really should have been the one to win.

If you look at the way the judging forms work, you’ll see it’s a weighted tally. So theoretically, a contestant who got all 2nd place votes could win if there were no other contestant who consistently was picked as 1st. That’s why we don’t take time into account until after voting is done.

Based on this system, it’s nearly impossible for a bias to sway the result. It would require a bias from most of the judges. If you think about it, most judges really do want the best person to win. As a judge, I’ve always taken pride in hearing that I picked the consensus winner. Otherwise I start to question my judging skills. Additionally, if the best speaker doesn’t go to the next level, we reduce our chances that we’ll win at the next level. After all, we wouldn’t want to send our 3rd best speaker to Region or International, would we?

There are always mistakes made. That’s why we have an appeal process. Aside from those rare occasions, this is pretty much the most fair judging model there is.

I recently read about a speaker who constantly blamed the judging for their inability to advance. One year, he finally realized that all he could do was worry about the part he has direct control over and let the rest go. That was the year he went much further than he ever had before. I really wish I could remember who that person was. If you know who I’m trying to think of, please leave a comment below.

The point is that it might be worth mentioning to potential participants that they’ll get a fair shake. It’s probably not an issue for most people but it might get a few more to participate that wouldn’t otherwise. If it helps, let them look at the judging form ahead of time.

And if you’re an AG, make sure you’re ready for scheduling your contest at the DEC meeting next Saturday.

The Smedley Award commemorates the founding of Toastmasters International on October 22, 1924, by Dr. Ralph Smedley. One person initiated a program that would go on to affect millions of people. In his honor, if your club can add five new, dual, or reinstated members between August 1 and September 30, you’ll receive a Smedley Award ribbon to display on your club’s banner. Your club will also earn a choice of one module from The Better Speaker Series, The Successful Club Series, or The Leadership Excellence Series.

Membership applications and payment for members who join between August 1-September 30, must be received at World Headquarters or online no later than September 30. Each member’s “join date” as listed on the application must be no later than September. Transfer and charter members do not count for credit. There is no need to apply for this award. Your club is automatically entered when the first new member application is received in August. See the Smedley Flyer.

But wait, there’s more! In addition to TI’s recognition, District 55 will award a first, second & third place prize for the clubs who add the most members. Gift certificates worth $50, $30, and $25 to the Toastmasters supply catalog will be awarded to the winners.

In reviewing how it went, there’d been a last minute panic moment with a concern that maybe we hadn’t promoted the event well enough. That was based on the fact that a couple people who were club officers hadn’t heard about the training through any of the lines of communication they would have expected. Someone suggested sending out an email reminder. We did that. Or rather, we asked our LGET to do that.

Taking another look at that process, we realized that I ought to reemphasize how important all our district supporting communication is. The way this particular communication was supposed to have worked was that the Austin division governors communicated with our area governors (AGs). Then the AGs communicated with their club presidents who then communicated with the club presidents.

As much as we’d like to think people read mass emails from the top, the truth is that we get much better results when it’s from the person one step up. As a club president, I pay extra attention to any email that comes from my AG or one of my club officers. Something generic sent out to the entire district is a much lower priority. For example, I’d heard about the $10 CL promotion as a district officer but hadn’t remembered to mention it to my club. Our AG visited and was able to remind me and even make the announcement herself.

If we have individual club officers who aren’t hearing about things like training, they need to go back up the chain to figure out where the message got lost. It’s vitally important for each person to make sure their folks stay informed. Otherwise they don’t know about training or whatever else and they miss out. When we go back and look at the DCP reports after the fact, it’s too late.

The takeaway here is that if you’re part of this system of communication, make sure your people are covered. If you know they’re busy and only halfway reading emails, make sure you get confirmation or send multiple reminders. If you’re an AG, make sure your club Presidents know that their club officers may not know about things if they don’t tell them. That’s an important part of their role.