Radical idea: Openly publish all our manuals and education materials on the TI web site, for anyone to read or use.
Why? Many members, especially those overseas, are affected by expensive and slow shipping. That might be helped by having local contract printers in the larger countries or regions, but we can’t do that everywhere, and it still costs money to print and ship.
As well, a growing number of members would like to have their manuals in an on-line form, enabling them to work on a presentation anywhere.
We could give electronic manuals only to paid members, but you can be sure someone will post them on a web site or blog or file-sharing service — and it only takes one such person to do so, since Google will find everything.
We could use DRM (Digital Rights Management) to encrypt and copy-protect electronic manuals, but there’s no such thing as an unbreakable DRM scheme. There’s always a way to break it, and it only takes one person to do so and then post the unencrypted manuals for anyone to use. There’s not much point in bothering with it, and it will just annoy members who want to use the materials on a device that doesn’t support the chosen DRM scheme.
The value in Toastmasters is not in the manuals and education materials, but in the club meeting: the actual presentation of the speech and the evaluations that follow. Sure, people will download the CC manual and try to learn from it, but they’ll quickly realize they need an audience and an evaluator, and they can find both at a Toastmasters club for very little cost.
I’m not saying just flip the switch and post all the materials at once, and I’m not saying we stop sending printed manuals out to members (it could be a checkbox on the new member application, “no printed manuals needed” along with English, Japanese, etc.). No, this needs some research and review, a pilot program, and if everything looks good, a gradual rollout. WHQ recently published a number of education pamphlets (Effective Evaluation, Gestures: Your Body Speaks and Your Speaking Voice booklets), and Moments of Truth has been out there for a couple of years. Continue by adding the rest of the Successful Club Series (mostly useful only within Toastmasters anyway) and contest forms, then maybe an advanced manual or two, or the Leadership Excellence Series.
Doing so will vastly increase the on-line visibility of Toastmasters. People will find these materials and become interested in joining Toastmasters. It could spark significant membership growth, while at the same time, improving service to our members (instant delivery), lowering costs (no shipping) and going green!
What do you think? Are there significant drawbacks I’ve missed? Add your thoughts in the comments!
Mike – how much of a profit center are the manuals for TI? I would think this would be the primary concern from a business perspective.
If it’s not going to significantly impact revenues, then by all means, publish online.
As it is, you can find information that provides a synopsis of manuals, and if someone really had no scruples, it would take only a day or so to scan and .pdf the manuals and create bootlegs now. The fact that they don’t exist reflects, in my eyes, the overall high character of the average TM member.
Rich, excellent question. I’m sure I don’t have all the answers, but I’d like to start a dialog on possibly doing this. The 2009 financial report (http://www.toastmasters.org/Members/MembersFunctionalCategories/AboutTI/Annual-Financial-Reports/2009FinRpt.aspx) indicates that sales of educational materials accounted for 8% of revenue. By comparison, 10% of expenses were for educational materials, suggesting a net loss (or certainly no great profit, anyway).
My concern is that if the materials are widely available online, there may be some who will try to emulate a Toastmasters club setting without the knowledge of experienced Toastmasters serving as sponsors and mentors. A few years ago, a fellow club member approached me because a school teacher wanted to use the Competent Communicator manual to facilitate a public speaking course for her students.
I believe that such a misuse of the CC manual would create an injustice to the students, who could benefit much more from a YLS taught by Toastmasters. Such a misuse also would be an injustice to Toastmasters International because the use of the materials by unqualified individuals would dilute the quality of the Toastmasters program.
Dori, good point, and I believe that can be addressed by control of the copyright and trademark, but I would leave that to the lawyers to consider.
Legal action probably could be taken for unauthorized use of the manuals . . . but only if WHQ becomes aware of such unauthorized use.
True, just as today.
Yes, but with all due respect, such unauthorized use is MUCH more likely to occur if the manuals are posted online for the general public to download and print. On the other hand, I was able to prevent the unauthorized use of the CC manual by the classroom teacher whom I mentioned in a previous entry submitted this morning . . . I simply refused to order the manuals for her. Hopefully other Toastmasters would take the same stance if they are presented with a similar request.
As I say, it’s a topic for discussion, not a “Let’s do it all right now” proposal. 🙂 The students of such a teacher might be much more likely to get involved in Toastmasters later on, when their class is done, even if the teacher did that.
I understand that this is just a discussion at this point. 🙂 But now that the subject has been broached, do we want to risk unauthorized use of the manuals with the idea that such use might result in positive PR for the organization? It also might result in negative PR if non-Toastmasters who lack Toastmasters skills and knowledge (such as the teacher referenced above) provide a low-quality introduction to Toastmasters . . . with whitewashed or overly critical speech evaluations as examples.
Furthermore, it is my recollection that the students in question were well under 18 and would have had no opportunity to proceed from the classroom to a bona fide Toastmasters club for several years, thereby reducing the effectiveness of any PR produced by their classroom exposure to the manuals.
No perfect solution, but I believe it is something we need to look into, and at this point, I think the positives outweigh the negatives quite significantly, especially when you factor in service to the member.
Mike, I believe that the discussion between PR and unauthorized usage misses what you implied in your initial post: better worldwide recruitment and retention of members and not mere PR.
Toastmasters is cost effective for North Americans and for many in our member countries. With the international dues remaining relatively constant in U.S. dollars and international exchange rates fluctuating annually, the current low value of the U.S. dollar makes Toastmasters affordable to many, but not all, around the world. In those countries where being a member of Toastmasters is a luxury, printing charges to those countries make Toastmasters even less affordable.
I embrace the I in TI beyond our regional administration of Districts. I advocate leadership and communication excellence to all, throughout the world, independent of social class. That’s what Dr. Smedley promoted in his public speaking classes at that YMCA in SoCal. Dr. Smedley could have easily presented his courses at a local university or fraternal organization, but he made the conscious choice to outreach to those who did not have the inherent advantage of education or network. Dr. Smedley advocated leadership and communication excellence to Everyman.
As of 1972, his advocacy speaks to Everywoman as well. At one TLI, I was training VPMs. One young lady asked in all sincerity: “I love Toastmasters, but I actually joined to meet men. I don’t see many around. In what clubs can I meet men?” After laughing out loud, I shared with her that we were regrettably a segregated organization until 1972. Our opening the doors to women is likely our biggest organizational success story. After that Wall of Jericho came a-tumbling down, I continued that we still have work to do to make this organization accessible to all, especially to those less fortunate around us.
One of my clubs started a scholarship fund that has covered the first six months of membership (international + club) for those who sincerely cannot afford our dues. We placed stringent attendance and project completion requirements in writing as a stipulation for us covering them. The result: not one scholarship recipient has ever left after those first six months. They found so much warmth and fellowship that they scraped the money together to renew six months later. One such woman rose to becoming an Area Governor!
Closing the loop, the cost of manuals can place membership in Toastmasters out of reach to many outside of North America. Advocacy of excellence in leadership and communication to those less fortunate throughout the world far outweighs the cost of unauthorized usage of materials. In that, I believe Dr. Smedley would agree.
Aref N. Dajani, DTM
Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
Past District 27 Governor
“Relax, it’s only Toastmasters.”
Aref, what a great message, thank you for your support!
I wonder if maybe the CCs and CLs are the wrong implementation here? You mentioned “Moments of Truth”, and maybe the right answer is to look at those underutilized programs like Better Speaker, Successful Club and Leadership Excellence series along with Success Communication and Success Leadership modules as the right starting point for such a program.
Some items, like the MoT poster and Speechcraft manuals, could still be available for purchase to allow a more professional appearance when needed.
Rob, I would certainly START with all the other materials, leaving the CC manual for last (after there’s a lot of experience with this). And I would not recommend we stop selling print copies either, for many reasons.
I believe the better solution is local printing plus delivery of printed materials to the individual member. That is the standard that World Headquarters began with…and all of us know it. It’s just that some of us are not getting equal service.
Putting a PDF on the website, in addition to inviting some of the issues already mentioned, degrades the high printing quality of the manuals. Furthermore, there are still many members who do not have access to broadband services that many in this forum probably do. Ours is an organization that puts high value in service to each individual member—with or without access to broadband.
In the local printing option, however, the *publisher* will still be Toastmasters International..It’s just that an electronic image of the document that is edited in California (manual, whatever) is transmitted to a local printer (possibly in-country, depending on the country) who then prints the document and sends it to the member. Toastmasters International, as the publisher, has the final say not only on content of the materials but also the general “look and feel” and branding involved.
Yes, that approach will mean managing a printing and delivery contract with a printer that World Headquarters staff would not know personally. Yes, it would mean periodic re-negotiation of the contract.
My take on it? With approval of Proposition A, our organization made a major commitment to grow to a truly International organization—not simply an American organization with less well-represented Districts Not Assigned to Regions. Our fastest-growing market is in ->India (where, btw, there are many printers). Get over it, America. It’s time for equal service to all.
Susan, you’re right, many and perhaps most members will still want printed manuals, and we need to offer those at a reasonable cost and with fast delivery, which means satellite printing services in major countries. Google for “global on-demand printing”, and quite a few companies come up with presence in dozens of countries world-wide.
I just want explore the potential of giving our members a CHOICE to download (or not), and to vastly improve the visibility of Toastmasters as “THE leading movement devoted to making effective oral communication a worldwide reality.”
I think all materials need to be downloadable from the TI website. I’ve been pleased to see the magazine going online.
Just because there is a likely potential for misuse, that potential exists today. If you look hard enough you can find them today. Having them come from TI is a much better option.
Saving 2% of revenue (theoretically) seems like it would be an added bonus.
Rather than focus on misuse, focus on the fantastic opportunity ahead.
John.
Hard copies of the manuals do not stop people from making photocopies of them, having soft copies just make it a little bit easier to make copies -that’s all.
In fact by not making soft copies available, TM is “punishing” people who don’t want to have to carry their manuals back and forth with them.
Personally, I would find it much easier if I could just have my manuals all downloaded to my e-reader or be able to log into the TMI website and download the manual when I need it – especially if I am travelling or simply don’t have my manual with me that day.
I do my banking online, I make airline, hotel & restaurant reservations online, I read books on my e-reader, I email & IM people, I use a software tool for the meeting Timer position (I am 50% more efficient than if I had to do things by hand). I don’t watch “live” TV – I PVR/Tivo everything or watch it via the Internet.
Some of you may perhaps have formed a picture in your mind of me as a hermit, a geek, but I am an extrovert who has a rich (in-person) social life. But the truth is I just happen to hate inefficiency and thus I use technology to facilitate my everyday life.
Technology is part of the world we live in, if we focus on the negative aspects of it, then Toastmasters will stand on the sidelines as the rest of the world skips ahead of us and some other organization meets people’s needs. (If you have ever read the book “Who Moved My Cheese” you’ll know what I am talking about).
Donna
Do you know that Amazon sells more books electronically then in print? They don’t seem to have concerns with misuse and CRM breaking, etc. Lets not design the system for the <1% of the people who may break the law or intent, but make it easy for the 99% of decent humans who would benefit from having access to the manuals. Its time the manuals are available online. As a first step just to members. Then we can debate weather we want them available to all.
I agree the written materials should be available via the internet.
I further advocate it because the trend today is away from hard copy reading material to material which can be read on computer, Kindle, or smart phone.
I belong to several organizations with international membership and am familiar with organizations making “locked” electronic copies available for sale.
Often, we have corporations with in-house membership “sections” of the international organization and for them, the international organization provides a “licensed” copy (for a fee which is a multiple of the single copy) – this licensed copy can then be placed on the corporate server for all corporate employees to access or copy to personal devices.
Economically, the fees which ARE paid far exceed the cost of preparation of an electronic copy and are more than adequate to make up for “pirated” copies, especially since all the overhead of printing, binding, storing, and shipping hard copies is eliminated. (saves whole forests, too!)
This topic of electronic copies of materials seems a good one to champion at the International level of Toastmasters.
For those that want or need hard copies, there are numerous services which will convert digital copy to hard copy, just as there are numerous services to convert digital photos to hard copies.
Wes, thanks for that comment. Unfortunately, copy restrictions, also known as “digital rights management” or DRM, introduce significant problems for the reader. They always require a special program to be installed to read the material, and to take a recent example, look at the Silverlight fiasco going on the last few months with getting performance reports from WHQ!
Furthermore, DRM is always broken, and it only takes one person to break it and post the content freely for anyone to see and copy on the Internet.
The value in Toastmasters isn’t in the manuals — it’s in the club meeting. Downloading a CC manual won’t teach you much, unless you have a club and fellow members to provide that evaluation.
WHQ published several items on-line in late 2011, such as the Successful Club Series. Since January — nothing. And I’ve asked — no plans to do so either.
Mostly what I’m seeing are “locked” pdf files with no copy or print privileges, but, of course, even an old relic like me has two or three ways around those.
My point was NOT to completely stymie piracy, but to make the electronic copies reasonable enough (99 cents?) that most would not have incentive to spend the time and effort to pirate copies.
Who would Xerox a hard copy of a manual if the electronic version were available for 99 cents?
I seeing even my age peers who have migrated to smart phones and tablets more and more frequently. It won’t be too much longer before few will WANT hard copies.
If the international organization continues to play ostrich on this issue, there will be any number of entrepreneurial pirates who will buy one legitimate hard copy of each publication, run it through a scanner and sell jpg files of every page.
Oh, you can find PDFs of Toastmasters manuals on-line now if your Google-fu is strong.
But I agree, it’s time to put it ALL on-line.
Mike,
To think that TI still expects me to order a physical product shows they are out of touch with the next generation of leaders.
Anyone that reads this and thinks otherwise is also out of touch with the next generation of leadership.
As mentioned in previous posts… I bank online… pay bills online… watch movies online… sign documents online… process credit cards on my phone for my business… check my kids grades, attendance and behavior reports online.
The value of Toastmasters is in the club / mentor / officer and community that gets created around the developmental experience.
Toastmasters International makes my progress through the material cumbersome and antiquated.
Sure, charge me a small fee to download the digital version. Yeah, maybe some people will rip off the content. I sell eBooks of my original work. I don’t want people to rip it off. But some might. But most won’t.
TI – get with the digital norm.
Seth Braun
With the small amount of the overall revenue coming from manuals, I do not think this is an issue. The miss use of the materials would be a concern. I think you would need to be a toastmaster to download the materials not just open it to any one to down load. This would help to prevent most of the miss use of the materials. Dori has a point that just putting them on the site would be a problem. A non member cannot purchase manuals and that should stay that way even if they are digital manuals. I would hope a member would not share the digital manuals with non members. I personally have made digital copies of all my manuals for my own use, but I do share the evaluation pages with my other Toastmasters when they forge a manual. I do not feel this is a problem with any law since all members have the manual they are working on and giving something they could produce themselves. I think all new members should be sent the paper manual because it is sometimes more of a commitment when they see it setting around to work on it and read it.
Well, it is worth not only dreaming high (I had similar dreams I told those from our District years ago) but it is also doing something about it. I think, soon we’ll see lots of material on-line.
Personally, I do not see “misuse”.
Yes, in our clubs, the feedback is primordial as well as learning lots of other communication and listening skills, but I am feeling democratic, each can or not use “knowledge” as he or she wants, needs. I hope, slowly we’ll go towards that.
Of course, I’ll still go to my club(s) to help others, to meet new and long time members, too.
@Mike. very interesting indeed. I do not know if it is too late to comment here so will be brief and chat to you on LinkedIn. It seems to me however that the comment here is overwhelmingly pro going online with the manuals – as am I. The prediction made early in this thread about if we ignore this it will happen anyway has come true. I am no Google Boffin but I found copies (including cc) while I was considering becoming a member and had not even been to my first meeting yet – meaning of course there was nothing unethical in this. I knew nothing of the copyright, I was just interested in joining and looking for my closet club and any other info I could find. That I did in fact join – within days – is a positive reflection of this outcome.
Lets join the modern world, lets benefit countries with a weak currency (like mine), lets help people join Toastmasters. Lets go ONLINE.
Thanks, Gina!
Dear Gina
I would appreciate all help from you
regards
Going online with soft copies will go a long way in advancement of toastmasters activity and will certainly be a big help. I do intend to work on this and will certainly appreciate any help from other members worldwide
Mike, I applaud you for putting the question before us. The straw poll indicates a market for “opt in” electronic publishing. The system would not be complete w/o a way of evaluating a speaker online. Why not go all the way with a secure publish/feedback system a la Facebook? The differences between us and Facebook would lead to a very unique eco-system formal vs informal membership; structured vs unstructured feedback; not-for-profit vs for profit orientation. Two billion consumers worldwide will get Smart phones by 2016 making the technological leap described in this comment highly achievable. Yet, until we all become telepathic there is a need for formal spoken communication. Mike, you have my support in drawing up a functional specification/business plan/whatever moves the idea forward. Thank-you. Bob
Bob, the problem with this is that many of our members are not on-line, or don’t have a smart phone, or don’t want to type in long evaluations on a tiny phone keyboard. Even if the majority do, we have to accommodate ALL our members. Many people choose not to use Facebook due to privacy concerns, and I’m sure many would have similar concerns about your proposed eco-system.
And it’s not up to me or any individual member to “draw up a plan”, but, the REP has said all materials will be available both on-line and in print.
Mike, I agree with you, let’s get these manuals online. I’m about to attend my 4th Toastmasters and have no manual yet. I’ve elected to be the Grammarian but will have to muddle my way through!
I wouldn’t mind receiving digital manuals only as I could read them on my Kindle or tablet.
I’m here if you need any help with it
The REP/Pathways is going to result in the entire education program being available on-line, it’s coming!
There are some good pages about meetings roles on the TI web site — here’s a link:
https://www.toastmasters.org/Membership/Club-Meeting-Roles
Totally agree. Seriously needed.