It’s often fun to indulge in a little nostalgia for the “good old days”, and many times, there might even be a lesson to be learned from what others have done before us.  Does your club keep records of club activities like meeting agendas?  There’s a list of minimum retention policies here, but keeping some things even longer is useful when it comes time to celebrate your club’s 10th, 20th, or even 50th anniversary.

I’ve attended such celebrations, and it’s very interesting to look at these documents from a different time, when only men could join, when they all wore suits and ties, and it was all quite formal.  Paging through a “Basic Training” manual from the 195os tells us a lot about where our organization came from, but it’s surprising how some projects look almost unchanged, like the Icebreaker.

A corporate club I helped to charter is nearing its 10th anniversary and I happened to run into a newer but very involved member from it at a recent contest.  She didn’t know I had been a club sponsor, but I still have the demo meeting agenda and the charter party agenda, and she wants to borrow them!

The Internet has done much to change how Toastmasters works.  There’s an organization which is busily archiving everything publicly available on the web (once it’s on the Internet, there’s no way to completely delete anything).  Thanks to that, I was able to put together a little slide show of how the Toastmasters International web site has looked over the years, going way back to 1996.  Seeing announcements from 2004 like “NEW! Pay your dues renewal ONLINE!” seem so odd in 2010, just six years later.

http://mikeraffety.com/TMtime/

Comments appreciated!