The annual business meeting is where we elect the board of directors, international officers, and amend our governing documents.  This year, Proposals A and B were on the table to allow WHQ to move to another state and formalizing the audit committee.

In previous years, we’ve occasionally seen a district that collected 100% of the proxies, but this is quite rare.  In 2015, the average was 68%, and this year, it was 70% (quorum is 33.3%).

The districts coming closest to representing all their clubs were:

• D90 (New South Wales, Australia) at 100% (well done!)
• D70 (Sydney, southern New South Wales and Australian Capital Territory, Australia) at 98.9% (missed two clubs, out of 189)
• D49 (Hawaii) at 98.5% (missed one club, out of 66)

At the other end of the scale, we had:

• D85 (north China) at 1.5% (only two clubs represented)
• D15 (Central Idaho, eastern Oregon, Utah, western Wyoming, eastern Nevada) at 9.2% (only eight clubs represented)
• D79 (Saudi Arabia) at 30.0%

It’s clear from the very small numbers that the district directors failed to pick up their votes for district 85 and 15, meaning those clubs who submitted proxies were then unrepresented at the business meeting.  That’s a very rare miss.

The top quarter of districts beat 86% representation, the top half beat 74%, and the top 3/4 beat 60%.

The vast majority of the votes come from clubs (99.2%, two per club), the rest are “at large” members, which is any current or past International Director (which includes International Presidents and officers), and the current District Directors (they each get one vote, regardless of any clubs they also may represent).  At-large members must attend in person, they cannot give their vote to someone else.

Of those votes from clubs, the large majority are represented by the District Directors.  There’s no way of knowing just how many, but based on my informal observations working in credentials, it’s probably 80% or more of the votes.  There were 813 people voting at the business meeting (got a voting device), more than any previous year.  Of those, 102 were District Directors and 176 were at-large members (who often had proxies from a few of their own clubs as well).  That leaves 535 non-DD/non-at-large voters, and they usually seemed to have votes for just one to three clubs, often from clubs in or near the convention city.

While there are many things more important for Toastmasters districts to devote scarce resources to (no, not speech contests, I mean helping struggling clubs and building new clubs), this is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be that hard to do.  A district proxy chair with a committee to call clubs and round up proxies makes an excellent High Performance Leadership (HPL) project!

Full details in the Excel spreadsheet here: proxies-2016 (Sessions 1-4 refer to the 4 times that credentials was open to pick up votes.)

Here’s my post on the 2015 proxy returns.

Annual business meeting proxies are how we do business.  This year, Proposal A was on the table to amend the Toastmasters club constitution, but only 74% of clubs were represented.  One district appears to have gotten every single proxy collected, D70 (southeastern Australia), 100%, even a new club that chartered Aug. 14 (Griffith Toastmasters), very impressive!

This was closely followed by another Australian district, D69 (eastern Australia), at 97% (missed 5 clubs) and my home district, D30 (Chicagoland), at 96% (missed 9 clubs).

Districts with (lots of) room to improve include D34 (Mexico) with just 37% of clubs represented, D52 (southern California) at 39%, and D82 (Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala, and Karnataka in India) at 49%.

The top quarter of districts beat 86% representation, the top half beat 75%, and the top 3/4 beat 66%.

While there are many things more important for Toastmasters districts to devote scarce resources to (no, not speech contests, I mean helping struggling clubs and building new clubs), this is the sort of thing that shouldn’t be that hard to do.  A district proxy chair with a committee to call clubs and round up proxies makes an excellent High Performance Leadership (HPL) project!

Full details in the Excel spreadsheet here: Proxies2013

On August 24, 2013, Toastmasters clubs will vote on amendments to the standard Club Constitution that every club must abide by.  It hasn’t been amended since 1994, and is in dire need of updating.  However, this revision is mostly clerical in nature, things that won’t affect club operations at all.  Let’s take a closer look.

The most noticeable change is renaming the “standard bylaws” to “addendum of standard club options”.  This is where the club fills in details like the name, where and when they meet, and the dues.  Some redundancies were also removed, since the old bylaws repeated things already found in the constitution. Continue reading “Toastmasters club constitution: Proposal A, 2013” →

Past International Director Rick Sydor had a few more records to complete the gap in the middle, the list is now complete for 37 years, from 1976 to now (and I’ll add the 2013 recipients as soon as I get them).

My greatest thank you to all these wonderful people who have contributed to the growth of Toastmasters over the years!

Toastmasters International Presidential Citations V3 (PDF)

Thanks to the archives of Past International Director Rick Sydor, my list of presidential citations now goes back to 1976, except for 1998-2002.  Anyone have those?

Toastmasters International Presidential Citations V2 (PDF)

Oddly, there’s no place on the TI web site listing who’s been awarded with Presidential Citations, presented at the August convention.  I have the Hall of Fame booklets going back to my first convention in 2003, so I typed them up and attach them here, ten years history.  Hopefully, World Headquarters will consider expanding this list and publishing it like the list of past International Presidents and World Champions of Public Speaking.

Toastmasters International Presidential Citations (PDF)