The Point

Get Your Club into Growth Mode

Every year Toastmaster clubs around the world are working on their Distinguished Club Goals (DCP). In order to get to all ten (10) goals a club needs to achieve the following:

- Goal 1 and 2: Four (4) Competent Communicator Awards

- Goal 3 and 4: Two (2) Advanced Communicator Awards 

- Goal 5 and 6: Two (2) Advanced Leader Awards

- Goal 7 and 8: Eight (8) new members

- Goal 9: Train their officers in the summer and winter

- Goal 10: Submit the officer list in the summer and get the dues in on time at least once

It’s very rewarding to reach all ten goals. There is lots of recognition on the area, division and district level as a result. Most importantly it’s fun to be part of a club that is humming like this. Now, all goals except 7 and 8 are about making it happen with existing club members. We can identify people by name, we can talk to them, track their actions and help them, if needed. So, goals one to six and nine and ten are basically about good management and leadership. Goals seven and eight are different. How do you reach out to people you don’t know yet? Here are three simple principles that are the key to success.

1. Every club meeting is a demo meeting

Consider every meeting as a demo meeting. A good meeting features well-prepared speeches, fun table topics and constructive evaluations. If you think there is a problem in the way your club runs its meeting, then your intuition is probably right. There are Toastmaster assessment tools (e.g. The Moment of Truth) that help to dig deeper. Use them. Get a club coach if a fresh outside perspective is needed. The VP Membership needs to be good in talking to visitors and following up. It should be everyone’s job to make sure that visitors feel welcome. If you have the foundation built, it makes sense to increase traffic to your club. New people will be attracted and join your group.

2. The club can be found easily

Traditionally, Toastmasters made all sorts of efforts to get the word out: Flyers at the library, hang outs at the local super market. I wouldn’t want to discount the effectiveness of those. However, in today’s world people go to the web to find out about stuff. So, your best bet is to make sure that your club can be easily found online.

a. Accurate club information on http://reports.toastmasters.org/findaclub/: Make sure that your club’s information is listed correctly on the global Toastmaster website. Check the correctness of the meeting time, location and contact information (email and phone)

b. Have a website for your club: This doesn’t have to be fancy. There is a free hosting platform that allows you to set up a club site. Check out www.freetoasthost.org. Ask your members to fill in their profiles. Give your club that personal touch that others can relate to. Check out this club as a simple example: http://fstoastmasters.org.

c. Search engine ranking: This requires a little more tech savviness, but it goes a long way. Submit the URL of our club site to the main search engines (e.g. Google, Yahoo, Bing). If you don’t know how to do this, find someone who does. Here is a simple litmus test. Conduct a Google search. Type “Toastmasters”, your city and state. For example search  for “Toastmasters Reston VA”. If your club shows up on the first page, you have done a good job. Ideally your club should be among of the first three links.

d. Leverage advanced platforms: There are additional ways for people to find you. Look at meetup.com or facebook.com. These platforms are social networking sites. You might consider to build a community of existing club members  and friends there. Then you can publish your meetings and reach out to others. I would recommend this after you have completed your work on a-c.

3. Reach out to the club member’s network

This last principle is about active marketing. There is a difference between corporate clubs and community clubs. I have recommendations for both.

 a. Bring a friend: This is the most straight forward approach for boosting attendance that works very well in community clubs. Put a meeting together with some of your stronger speakers. Arrange for a nice welcome. Ask every member in your club to bring at least one friend to the meeting. Involve your guests in the meeting. Table topics is great for that. Don’t forget to ask for feedback. Arrange the follow up.

b. Toastmasters means business: Corporate clubs have the opportunity to tie Toastmasters to the goals of their company. At the end, what organization doesn’t need good speakers and leaders. Talk about your club in the company  newsletter and publish an article on the intranet site. It makes a huge difference if your club officers are able to secure executive sponsorship within your company. If company officials are endorsing the club, you will have it much easier to reach out and stir up interest. Go for it. Executives will get the value of Toastmasters quickly.

Personally, I have seen clubs that are President Distinguished year over year. Some accomplish all ten goals in the first six months of a Toastmaster year. I also have witnessed how a low membership club with six members grew to a club with more  than thirty members within eighteen month. The success of these clubs is based on these three simple principles. If your club goes systematically through the recommended actions, visitors will come to your meeting and you will turn visitors into members. A little extra tip. It has always been a good idea to feed your members and visitors very well. Great speeches combined with great food are irresistible.

Social Networking in Business – The Results of the Survey

When Britney Spears launched her back-to-school commercial for Candie’s this summer, it wasn’t first seen on TV. It wasn’t first in theaters, either. She launched the commercial on Facebook, Twitter and BritneySpears.com. So, we don’t have to guess where marketing pros think our kids hang out online these days. But what about us — Professionals in their thirties and upward. This is the group of people I mostly interact with on my job. This is also the majority of the readers of “The Point”.  I had posted a questionnaire on how we use social networking sites a few months back. Today, I am publishing the results. The survey had a little over one hundred participants. I asked three simple questions to ensure that the survey could be completed in less than a minute.

Question 1: What social networking platform are you using?

This question allowed multiple answers, because most of us join multiple networking sites over time. As expected, Facebook and LinkedIn scored high. MySpace didn’t score high at all among readers of “The Point”. Twitter and Plaxo came in with decent results. Among “Others” particpants named sites such as Skype, Ning, TonyRobbins, GreenPearl and Naymz.

 Question 2: How many hours do you spend on one or more of these sites on a weekly basis?

It is worth mentioning that some folks in the last categoy “+20h” spend as much as forty hours on social networking sites per week. On average, the survey participants spend 6.42 h on these sites. The median came in a tad lower with 5 h.

Question 3: How do you navigate to these sites?

The majority is still using their computer to navigate to social networking sites. But our iPhones/Blackberry usage is catching up. Certainly the downloadable apps make the wireless visit to sites such as Facebook and Linkedin easier.  Twitter is optimally suited to be used from a cell phone. Anyone following Lance Armstrong’s tweets this season on the Tour de France knows that.

Based on some of the comments I received so far, it appears that social networking is already a serious tool for people in the search industry as well as  those in business development or sales roles. This is not a surprise – the benefit is obvious. As social networking becomes increasingly  important in our business lives, I am interested in all the use cases that are out there. How do we leverage our membership with the LinkedIn’s of the world conducting business? Please feel free to comment or simply send me an email to my LinkedIn account.

Charities go mobile

On May 13th, 2009 Alicia Keys came to American Idol as the Global Ambassador for “Keep a Child Alive”.  She put together a great show featuring the 15-year-old Rwandan rapper Noah, who is receiving care at the KCA-funded Icyuzuzo Clinic in Kigali, Rwanda. Noah hopes to change his personal life, and the future of others living with HIV through his music. On American Idol, Noah performed “The World’s Greatest”. Afterwards, Alicia Keys asked the audience to send the text message “ALIVE” to 90999 in order to contribute $5 to the cause. These one-time donations are added to the mobile phone bill or deducted from a prepaid balance. The results were astounding. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were collected within a short period of time.

The infrastructure that makes collecting donations through text messages possible, is the result of the Non-For-Profit organization “Mobile Giving Foundation“. The Foundation was created in order to combine the capabilities of the U.S. wireless industry with the need of charitable organizations to find a new class of donors and more intuitive methods of facilitating contributions. The Foundation is working with US wireless carriers to create a “Mobile Giving Channel”. This channel would allow wireless subscribers to instantaneously respond to charitable solicitations using text messaging via all US wireless carriers. The foundations forecasts that more than US $1 million per month will be raised through mobile giving campaigns in the U.S. market by the end of 2009. Over 220 well-known charities have joined the “Mobile Giving Foundation” utilizing its infrastructure as the new way of giving through people’s cell phone bill. At http://mobilegiving.org/Charities.aspx you can find active programs to support.

My friend Christian Zimmern works for the foundation as the VP of Partnerships and Programs. He explained that contributing by text messaging constitutes as a tremendous advancement over current means. Contributors don’t need to write a check, fill out forms, or call someone. They just text a reply, and the giving cycle is complete. The time lapse from notification to contribution can be seconds rather than days, weeks or months. By the way, I just sent Noah (90999) another text message “ALIVE”. I got my acknowledgement within seconds and replied with “YES”. If all readers of this blog do the same as they read this sentence, we will have raised another $50,000 in no time. Let’s do it!