My home district (D30, Chicagoland) had their conference this last weekend, and it was deja vu all over again for me. The first district conference I ever attended had been at the same location, a suburban Holiday Inn, in 2002.
Not only was it my first district conference, but I had been cajoled into doing an education session on club newsletters! I had started up a club newsletter (which was back before club web sites were really big), and the conference education chair happened to be the president of my club. She was looking for people to do presentations, and talked me into it.
Now, I hadn’t even completed my CTM (the old CC) at the time she asked, but I rushed to complete that before the conference so I would have a badge. I had been in Toastmasters for a year and a half, and was barely halfway through my first term of being a club officer, VP-PR, so I was pretty new at this, but felt confident, since this was a topic I knew a lot about.
Finally, it was time for my presentation, and there were maybe five people in the audience, most of whom were from my own club. Why not more? A well-known and very popular Toastmaster was giving a presentation at the same time in the next room over. He had a room twice the size, and a standing-room-only crowd.
I think the presentation went well, but it’s been a long ways from that first district conference presentation, to my Living DCP presentation.
I learned a few lessons about conference planning from that …
- When planning parallel conference or TLI education sessions, be mindful of how popular the speakers and topics are likely to be. Match up speakers to rooms based on that.
- If you have a terribly popular speaker, put him or her in a general session, don’t put starter speakers up against a star.
For anyone interested, here’s the PowerPoint presentation I gave — it’s pretty much still accurate, though club newsletters don’t get the same attention that they used to.
Mike, This is good advice. I ran into the same thing at the last Spring conference. It was my first educational presentation, and I was up against Johnny Campbell’s session about money – didn;t stand a chance. Shoot, I wanted to go to that session myself! I ended up with about a dozen people. It was a good session, but I of course would have liked to see more attendees. That being said, I’m confident there were logistical roadblocks that the education chair had to take into account when scheduling the sessions.