Area Governors: if you haven’t already contacted your club presidents, now is the time to start doing that.
Presidents: if you haven’t heard from your AG, you can initiate the contact. We haven’t gotten officer lists yet so your AG might not know who to contact. The reason for that is we’re still waiting for the realignment to go through at Toastmasters International. Then they’ll give us the realigned officers lists. Emails for your AGs are listed on the district website here: http://tmd55.org/divisions.shtml. Just click on your respective division’s clubs link.
When you visit, check and see whether your clubs will be participating in the contests. Club contests need to be held in August and area contests in September. We’ll post area contests on the calender as they get scheduled.
If it turns out some of your clubs won’t be participating, it would make sense to see about combining with another area to have a more complete contest. As enjoyable as they are, it’s really not fair for us to ask 6-8 judges plus role players to block out an evening to come and listen to 2 speakers.
Also, at least in Division K, I’m encouraging you AGs to have the clubs support their own contestants. In the past, the only way we were told to get judges was to swap (i.e. go judge other people’s contests). I’d end up judging 6-10 contests per season.
If you like doing that, that’s fine but it shouldn’t be the only way to get judges. Ask each club that participates to send 2 judges, 2 role players and refreshments. That way everyone’s represented fairly and you don’t come out of pocket too much for refreshments. There’s no budget for contests so it’s up to individual chairs on how elaborate they want to make things.
If you don’t know how to run a contest in general, there’s a few pages on it in the Area Leadership Handbook on the Resources page.
