Finally, it was our turn to take the stage to introduce the next conference theme!
Lots of pics were taken.
We left as early as we could, since we had to be back by 8:30 in the morning, yet still we were quite late. This conference is now but memories, but we are getting ready to create many more!
What is the greatest value
Toastmasters provides to you?
How do you think your fellow club members would answer these same questions? The same as you? If not, would you say they are wrong?
For example, here are some possible answers to What type of organization is Toastmasters?
Education
Professional
Corporation
Business
Volunteer
Non-Profit
Service
Social
Fraternal
Networking
Audience
Customer base
And some possible answers to What are the core strengths of Toastmasters?
Mentoring
Communication
Self-esteem
Mutual support
Skill building
Honest feedback
Self-confidence
Leadership
Commitment
Coaching
Your answer to the third question should clarify your earlier answers to help you understand your own Toastmasters philosophy. I invite you to take a look at my answers:
What type of organization is Toastmasters?
Fraternal
What are the core strengths of Toastmasters?
Self-esteem
Self-confidence
What is the greatest value Toastmasters provide to you?
A forum for expressing and receiving new ideas
How well does your philosophy fit with mine? Are we compatible? Through my many years in Toastmasters, I know there are several philosophies incompatible with mine. For example, someone with a Corporate / Leadership bias expects each member to do what is best for the club. I, on the other hand, expect each member to do what is best for himself or herself. After all, that is what I do!
Therein lies the crux of the problem: The meaning Toastmasters is different for each member.
One Toastmasters club I have visited the expected attire is business professional and all speeches are presented from behind the lectern at the head table. This reflects the philosophy of the membership which then creates an environment that attracts like-minded people and repels others.
As long as a club is gaining enough members, this is not a problem, but if not enough visitors are signing up, then perhaps the club needs to consider being more open and appealing to alternative philosophies. Maybe a socially-oriented club needs to be more open to service-oriented. Or a professionally-oriented club needs to relax the emphasis on commitment.
Similarly, if many members are leaving, is there a philosophical conflict occurring? Were those members seeking self-esteem boost but get turned off by a corporate philosophy? Did an emphasis on leadership drive away members who only wanted to speak?
In one sense, what I am describing here is reframing conflicts within a club to conflicts of philosophy rather than conflicts of personality, but not every conflict can be so reframed. However if the reframing is possible, then the conflict becomes less personal and therefore easier to resolve without hurting egos.
My real goal, though, is to get every member thinking about what Toastmasters is really about and realizing that there are many answers, all of which are legitimate for someone.
Why did I even think this way? I have been noticing (and frustrated by) a distinct corporate philosophy bent from the Toastmasters International board for several years now. On many occasions I have suffered from a noticeable business demeanor from District leadership. Yet when I look back at when Ralph Smedley started Toastmasters a century ago, his idea was simply to help the young blue-collar and unemployed men on the street speak with more confidence, a clearly service-oriented fraternal organization. How have we come so far from that beginning? When I hear longtime members talk about Toastmasters, they talk about how the club has become like family. Do you notice the differing philosophies? I have already seen them cause conflict, anger, and very hurt feelings that could have been so easily avoided -- if only we bothered to understand!
I am selfish. When I want to take on an officer role, it's for a selfish reason. For my first stint as VP Public Relations in 2008, all I wanted was to make a newsletter, but that was just a step to my true goal: learning the publishing program Scribus. My newsletters turned out pretty good as simple elegant one page fold-over pamphlets. I got what I wanted, and that's what Toastmasters is all about, after all: Getting out of it what you want!
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.
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 is best for brief statements. I find it most useful for sharing blog posts, announcing accomplishments, sending brief reminders, and sharing articles and quotes.
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'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.
Instagram
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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!
What a weekend! My son was certainly disappointed at missing the conference, but my step-daughter got to experience her first Toastmasters District Conference.
We were challenged to post about the conference to social media. On Twitter we were to use the hashtag #TMD84.
The first night is the night everyone dresses up for the theme. Since the theme was "The Rhythm's Gonna Getcha", a play off of Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine's song "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You", the costumes were based on rock stars.
The chicken breast was rather tough, I'm afraid. I made the mistake of getting up from my chair and taking a couple steps away to talk to a Toastmaster at the next table. When I turned around
No recordings available. I placed second (out of two!) at this club contest, but since both first and second place were permitted to advance to the Area 33 contest, I chose to represent Safe Words at the Area level since that allowed all the competitors in my other clubs to also compete at the area level.
Area 33
Division C
Now it was time for the finals!
Test Speech: "If At First You Don't Succeed" - Carey David
While preparing my evaluation, I had identified a few opportunities for technical improvements, but they all seemed rather small and nitpicky to me. So I decided to emphasize the speech's flexibility for many different situations. I was aiming for something unique as well as productive, an idea that would help take that speech to a higher level.
Contestant 6 - Steven Morgan
Alas, I did not place in the contest. The feedback I received from various people afterward was interesting. Several people thought I had done well. A few thought I should have placed or won outright. One liked my unusual approach but thought it was probably not appreciated by the judges. Another thought I had not given any useful feedback and if I had stuck to my usual style I would have won.
Saturday Lunch
During the Saturday lunch at the fall conference, District 84 roasts the Immediate Past District Governor. This year, that person was someone who first joined Toastmasters as a member of Omni Toastmasters back when I was a member there in 2008. I wanted in on this roast, so I specifically requested a speaking slot. When I qualified for the Evaluation Contest, I realized I would not be able to dress up Friday night. My son was also bummed at not being able to go as his (and my) favorite artist, Weird Al Yankovic. So I decided to take on that role and dress up for the roast, and here is what I did!
It was fun! And quite memorable!
Saturday Night
Saturday night is the Humorous Speech contest. That is the one contest I have yet to get to the District level. This is also the night to dress formally! Of course, my wife loves to get all dressed up, especially if it involves sparkles:
The drumbeat for the Distinguished Club Program pounds through every club officer training session. Area Governors report how each club is performing to the DCP. Areas, Divisions, and Districts are evaluated in part by how many clubs achieve Distinguished Club status.
When seeking support for the DCP, I have heard club and district officers appealing to pride in the club or district.
I believe they have it all wrong.
I have seen many examples of strong clubs failing to achieve Distinguished Club status, and I have seen many weak clubs achieve Presidents Distinguished Club. To me, that means that the Distinguished Club Program goals are not particularly good indicators of strong clubs.
When someone appeals to me by using pride in the club, I am always reminded of a pep talk, the kind given by a sports coach or a corporate executive -- that is, the kind of motivation intended to inspire a team. The problem I have with this approach, and why I think it so often fails, is that Toastmasters is not a team.
Each member has personal reasons for being in Toastmasters. To gain these members' support, an appeal must be made to those selfish, personal reasons. Answer that question, WIIFM? What's in it for me?
I like to look at the Distinguished Club Program from a different point of view.
Consider the Toastmasters Communication track; you are given manuals with projects. Each project has objectives and a suggested plan for achieving those objectives in the project description. What if there is a corresponding structure in the Toastmasters Leadership track?
In fact, the Competent Leadership manual follows this structure: each project has objectives and a plan to reach those objectives. How about the rest of the leadership track, the Advanced Leader Bronze and Advanced Leader Silver?
Advanced Leader Bronze requires serving as a club officer. Each club officer receives a leadership manual. Each office has objectives, and those objectives include both the standards for the office ... and the Distinguished Club Plan. The manual provides ideas for achieving those goals, as does club officer training.
Advanced Leader Silver requires being a district officer which has its own manual, objectives, and training to achieve those objectives. In addition, the ALS requires a High Performance Leadership project which is a manual with a process to set your own goals and establish your own plan to achieve those goals.
My point is this: the value of the Distinguished Club Program is not as a measure for club success or recognition. By setting goals, demonstrating action plans, and requiring evaluations, the true value of the Distinguished Club Program is in how it provides a plan for developing leadership skills.
Therefore, I say that the best way to make the DCP appeal to members is to to pitch WIIFM. Tell how the DCP will help each individual member develop leadership skills: setting goals, developing action plans, time management, organization, delegation, mentoring, and more.
In the end, the club's DCP achievement is unimportant; my personal goals are what matter to me.
I generated my own handout which can be found here. My goal with the handout was twofold. First, the handout is designed for the attendees to write a lot of information, hence engaging the kinesthetic learning modality. Second, the information each attendee writes down will provide them plans, leadership styles, motivation styles, and goals for their term as President. For those who are interested, my own filled out form is here.
My main goals for the training were for each participant to:
Understand how the Distinguished Club Program helps teach leadership skills
Realize a Toastmasters Club President has responsibility without real authority
Recognize the goals and motivations of each of the other club officers
Attempt big ideas and big changes
Be willing to fail
Encourage other officers and members to be willing to fail and support them in their efforts
As a member of Toastmasters International and my club, I promise: ... To serve my club as an officer when called upon to do so ... It's that time of year again! Time to figure out who will be the club officers for the next term! Will you be one?
Here are some of the reasons I have heard from Toastmasters members for not taking on a club officer role:
I don't have the time.
I'm not ready.
I don't think I will do a good job.
That's too much responsibility.
I don't know how to do it.
In essence, all of these reasons boil down to: "I am afraid to fail." I believe this indicates a deeper misunderstanding of what being a club officer actually means.
Remember what Toastmasters is about! From the club mission (I prefer the old wording, but the new wording says the same thing):
We provide a supportive and positive learning experience in which
members are empowered to develop communication and leadership skills,
resulting in greater self-confidence and personal growth.
The key phrases I want to point out are "supportive and positive learning experience" and "empowered to develop ... leadership skills".
I certainly do not expect anybody to be a world-class public speaker when giving the first Icebreaker speech. As a Toastmaster, I note the skills the speaker already has and suggest what skills can be developed and ways to develop them. I encourage everyone to get up and speak again, even to give the same speech again. As Toastmasters, we are all familiar with this, and that is what we expect when it comes our own turn to speak.
Here is the misunderstanding from all of those reasons given above: The underlying assumption is that one must already have the leadership skills BEFORE taking the office!
That is the same as expecting every Icebreaker to be a world championship speech!
I do not expect ANY officer to do a perfect job. I don't even expect an officer to do a good job. I just expect them to be willing to do the best job they can. As a Toastmaster, I am more than willing to help any officer with their duties. I am happy to provide feedback as well, even to suggest how to develop the skills they feel they are lacking.
As an aside, what I love about the High Performance Leadership program: the guidance committee provides feedback about my leadership skills. I believe every club officer should have similar, formal, regular feedback. That is something I intend to try doing at my clubs.
At times, I have heard a member express discontent with how a particular member is performing their office duties. My question to that member is this: "What have you done to help that member succeed?"
I am not saying to take every office offered to you. I have turned down offices before, but not for fear of failure. I have also taken on certain offices because I felt I was lacking the skills necessary for that office, and I intended to use that office as an opportunity to develop those skills. After all, training is provided, you can't be fired, and everyone wants you to succeed.
So when a member says to you that they are not ready to hold an office, simply respond with "That is exactly why you are!"
