Adding value to your Toastmaster club

After thirty months of the global pandemic, businesses, government bodies, and volunteer organizations all realize they must deliver more value to their customers and members than they have been able to recently muster. But can a battered Toastmaster club add value?

The best way for a club to approach this situation is to do a thorough review of their current strengths as they complete their annual Club Success Plan. Do a SWOT or SOAR analysis and add your new value around the strengths of your club.

To start with, how can you make your meetings more welcoming, more vibrant, and more professional to your members and guests? A wonderful place to begin would be to ensure that each meeting is built around two Pathways speeches. If your club is small and this is difficult, work with your Area Director, or another club, and create a regular flow of guest speakers to complement your own club speakers.

Every club needs a mentoring system; not just for members, but for the type of prospective member you want to attract to your club. A mentoring system implies that more than one Toastmaster engages in coaching/mentoring and that component parts of the process are managed by members with dissimilar experience levels. For example, members who have completed Levels 1 and 2, can help coach new members with minor meeting roles, while veteran members can focus on the speeches of new members.

More than anything else, your executive must be positive, proactive, and innovative.  As Pablo Picasso stated, “Action is the foundational key for all success.”  And so it is with adding value to your Toastmaster club.

Ron MacTavish,
DTM Mastermind Group

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