Toastmasters in Austin

There seems to be a huge variety of Toastmasters websites out there in Austin.

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.