VP Public Relations has duties other than the newsletter. I should say "had" rather than "has" because a newsletter is no longer an official duty for the office any more. The official duties listed in the Club Leadership Handbook today include:
- Publicize
- Meeting times and location
- Club activities
- Member achievements
- Special events
- Establish club presence
- Local calendars
- Social media
- Keep club website current
In 2008, all I did was fiddle a bit with our FreeToastHost site and ask our local newspaper to run our meeting in their classifieds section which took all of 5 minutes. You could say that I did a lousy job with my duties. And yet, by the end of that 6 month term, the club had already signed up 10 members and earned 7 of the 10 DCP goals. The club was achieving its goals. I was achieving my goal. You know what I call that? Success!
Online Presence
Before you invest your time and money in a new person or a venture, what do you do? If you're like me, you look up information online. First I look up the information provided directly, then I search for what others have to say.
Toastmasters clubs are encountering this behavior more and more. Most of the visitors to my clubs found out about us online either through the Toastmasters International website or via the club's own website. Therefore I make it a high priority to make sure the information on those sites is accurate and timely. I also want these online resources to portray the club's personality and accomplishments as well as provide a way for club members and guests to interact in ways that will spread the word to more people. Today, that means engaging social media.
Facebook (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators, Safe Words)
A Facebook group page allows all members to contribute. Alternatively, an organization page allows the content to be centrally controlled. Facebook is a great place to post pictures, announce accomplishments, and share quotes of wisdom and inspiration. Facebook also has events, so share your club meetings as events open to the public and have members RSVP and share the events themselves.
Twitter (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators)
Twitter is best for brief statements. I find it most useful for sharing blog posts, announcing accomplishments, sending brief reminders, and sharing articles and quotes.
LinkedIn (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators)
Since LinkedIn has become prominent in professional circles, a club catering to professionals should certainly have a presence here. Many Toastmasters clubs have organization pages. Currently I have personal pages for two of my clubs tied to the club's VPPR email address. The information shared here is the same as shared on Facebook.
Google+ (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators)
Google's answer to Facebook which has lost its hype these days. A Google+ account can have a separate page for an organization, but it is owned by that Google+ account which makes it a pain to transfer to a new officer. Two of my clubs use Google for Nonprofits, so that Google+ account is for the club and transferring the account is all that is needed. The information shared here is the same as what is shared on Facebook.
I know Instagram is big, but since I am not particularly visual I have not explored this much. Any suggestions?
Hootsuite
Managing multiple accounts for one club is difficult enough. Managing multiple accounts for multiple clubs is a mess! Hootsuite is a service that centralizes the handling of all the accounts. With one action, a post or a picture can go to all the accounts for a club -- or all the accounts for all clubs! The free account can handle enough for one club.
Website! (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators, Safe Words)
Whether it's a toastmastersclubs.org website or some other hosted platform, a club's website performs the same function as the first member to greet you at a Toastmasters meeting. For guests, the club website is the first point of contact where questions are answered and first impressions are made. For members, the club website is where to reconnect with the club and see what is going on. Either way, the website needs to be appealing, timely, useful, and simple to use.
Personally, I do not like the toastmastersclubs.org design. That is mostly due to my personal background as a software engineer.
Email is SO OLD! And yet it is still a mainstay of online communication today. There are two types of email addresses a club should have:
- An external email for contacting the club, one that guests would use. This one should be listed as the club's contact email on the Toastmasters International website.
- A single email for contacting all club members. Yahoo Groups and Google Groups are both good at this, and both archive messages which is great for historical perusal.
Other email addresses that can be very useful to have:
- A single email for contacting all club officers.
- An email for each club officer, which is ideal for signing up for the other social media accounts because then all that one officer needs to transfer to a successor is the email account. The same could be done with the external email for the club, too.
Meetup (Central Florida Facilitators)
Many Toastmasters clubs have used Meetup.com successfully to recruit new members. Here is the advice that I have experienced and heard repeated many a time to make Meetup successful:
- Using a shared Meetup account (such as the District's or a Division's Meetup) is only effective if that account is listed geographically near your club's meeting location. Otherwise people looking for clubs near your location won't find you!
- Getting a Meetup account just for your club is most effective since you can set location and track members. This costs money, though, on the order of $90 every six months.
- Meetup events are useful when many people RSVP, and this is something you cannot do alone. Somehow you have to get members to take a minute to RSVP to all your club's Meetup events so that visitors see that there will be many people attending. I'm still trying to figure out how to get members to keep up on this!
- Including links to your website, agenda, and other details are very helpful since they make the event information richer.
YouTube (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators)
How many times have you heard the advice to record your speeches and review them later? Why not share those speeches for everyone? Assuming they are willing, of course. In two of my clubs, I have been regularly recording meetings and posting and blogging them online for over a year now, and the results have been very positive. You could also make videos for new members or share videos others have made. And you can embed these videos into your website for an even better visual appeal!
Blog (Lake Mary, Central Florida Facilitators)
Blogging began more like an online diary, but it has since inherited the role of independent reporting and opinion columnist. A blog is an excellent place to post announcements, write little tidbits or articles, and share recaps of club meetings and business. By writing content rich blogs with links to external resources and encouraging incoming links to your blog, your blog gains higher notoriety with search engines.
Put them all together and you can do this:
- Announce your meeting on Meetup, Facebook, Google+, and Twitter.
- Video record all or part of the meeting and upload to YouTube
- Share pictures from the meeting on Instagram
- Tweet highlight quotes from the meeting
- Blog about the meeting with the pictures, quotes, and video from the meeting
- Share link to the blog entry on Facebook, Google+, and Twitter
- Repeat next week!
IRL
Beyond the online, traditional methods still are effective for a good segment of the population. Get your club meetings announced in the newspaper. Find local reporters willing to write about you. Put up flyers on public boards. Give your members business cards and brochures to hand out. Encourage word-of-mouth!
On Stage
Here is the video of the training session held on January 9 for District-sponsored club officer training.
"Non"Profits
What follows is what I had hoped to be talking about more during the VPPR session, but as I attempted to sign up another club for Google for Nonprofits, I found Google rejecting the application. One thing had changed since last I had done this, and that is that getting registered as an affiliated organization under a group umbrella requires different verification now. It was clear, though, that other U.S.-based Toastmasters clubs had accomplished this feat which means any Toastmasters club in the U.S. should qualify. Nonetheless, Google continues to reject the application. (If there were any doubt that Google's offering here was motivated by self-interest rather than philanthropy, this certainly seals the deal!)
Four years after my first VPPR stint writing newsletters, I jumped at the chance to be Vice President Public Relations again. This time my goal was simple: Get us a better web site. As a professional software engineer, I was disgusted with FreeToastHost. The user interface was awful! Yes, I did it again. I was selfish.
Thus began my quest: The Quest for the Customizable Transferable Website! Across the Internet I slogged over megabits -- nay, gigabits! -- of data. From the high plains of GoDaddy to the murky swamps of Virtual Private Servers I roamed until my Googling led me back to the very place I started: Google. There was the Golden City I sought: Google Apps for Education.
Here was everything we needed:
- Google Sites for the club website
- Customizable
- Google Mail for club email
- Google Drive for storing files online
- Google Calendar for sharing meetings and other events
- Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides for creating desktop documents
- Google Photos for storing and sharing pictures
- Google Groups for email lists with saved history
- Google+ for, well, Google+
- YouTube support for sharing larger videos
- Blogger for publishing blogs
- Individual accounts -- such as an account for each club office
- Transferrable
Google Apps for Education is available for free to students and non-profit schools. Google Apps for Business is available for businesses, but they require a fee. If only there were a way for a Toastmasters club to acquire such great treasures for free.
Then it appeared, underlined and waiting to be clicked: Google for Nonprofits!
See, it costs Google next to nothing to let non-profit organizations use their services for free, and in return Google can deduct the market price of these services as non-profit donations on their taxes.
Toastmasters International (in the United States) is a 501(c)(3) non-profit educational organization. Therefore every Toastmasters club is eligible for Google for Non-Profits!
This is what it took:
- Looking up the club's Employer Identification Number (EIN), the corporate equivalent to a Social Security Number. Any club officer can find this
- Log in to www.toastmasters.org
- Go to Leadership Central -> Club Central
- Select your club
- Select Update my club meeting information
- Scroll down until you see the Federal EIN listed
- Sign up for Google for Nonprofits
- This is all I needed to do before. Now it appears that this is not the case due to how Google changed the signup process. I am still trying to figure it out and well no doubt be blogging about it when I do!
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