Besides the usual dreary stats of nearly 300,000 members in almost 13,000 clubs in 117 countries, how can we make this more exciting?
300,000 members is the same size as the population of Cincinnati, Ohio (the site of the 2013 international convention). If everyone were lined up holding hands in a human chain, we would reach from Chicago to Detroit.
The biggest country with no Toastmasters club is Bangladesh, the 9th largest by population, 142 million potential members. Next is Vietnam with 87 million, and Iran with 76 million. The U.S. has the most clubs, about 8,400.
The most popular meeting day is Wednesday, over 3,500 clubs, followed closely by Tuesday and Thursday. I would estimate that on any given Wednesday night, there are over 1,000 clubs meeting simultaneously.
The city with the most clubs is Singapore with 178, followed by Toronto (138, not counting metro areas), Washington (136) and Houston (134).
There were about 37,000 CC and AC awards issued last year, that’s an average of about 1,000 manual speeches a day. Adding in a rough estimate of speeches from members that don’t result in an award, and it’s more like 1,500 a day. At an average of 7 minutes each, that’s 175 hours of speeches per day, or 7 simultaneous speeches 24 x 7 x 365 (though I bet it’s much higher in June!).
With more than 1,100 DTMs awarded each year, that’s over three every day!
Toastmasters is over 88 years old now. Back in 1924, when it was founded, IBM was also founded, Macy’s held their first Thanksgiving Day parade, Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus was found, the Dow Jones was at 100, and the first-ever winter Olympics games were held.
Despite a dues increase and a rebranding (or perhaps because of the rebranding?), membership payments are up 3.7% and paid clubs are up 5.3% compared to the same date a year ago (from the Executive Director’s report).
So there’s another perspective on Toastmasters! What examples would you use to illustrate how big Toastmasters is?
Loved this article. Great play with numbers! Thank you, Mike!
Toronto, has 9 districts inside Toronto, with just shy of 200 clubs,
D60 was split, and the GTA must have at least 100 more clubs
Justin, do you mean 9 *divisions*?
That is a great article, putting the member and club numbers in perspective.
Just to add a bit more detail, the most popular club meeting time in the world is noon, the second most popular is 7 pm, and the third most popular is 6 pm. These rankings are the same for all days, or for just Wednesdays.
Worldwide, there are about 1400 clubs meeting on Wednesday evenings (any time from 5-9 pm), about the same number that meet Weds noon.
Very nice! I’ll share this one on our club’s Facebook page.
If there are over a thousand TM clubs meeting on Wednesday night, that would fill Crew Stadium here in Columbus, Ohio (assuming most people showed up, anyway.)
If it takes about an hour to prep all your speeches, about 50 hours of work to be a club officer for six months, about 50 hours of work to attend all the meetings and do the miscellaneous jobs for the CL, and about 400 hours for (collectively) all the rest of the stuff it takes to get your DTM, that works out to 539,000 hours of labor per year (of awarded DTMs.) Or approximately 320 man-years of labor (assuming you take vacation, sick, and holidays, and work 40 hour weeks.) So it makes sense that individual people take five years (or more) to get their DTMs, when you think about it.
To feed all the members of Toastmasters International for one day (assuming a gross caloric intake of 2100 calories per day per person) you would need to have 630,000,000 calories – perhaps that’ll be clearer if I say “3 million Hershey bars” or “1.26 million cans of Chef Boyardee,” or “about enough skim milk to fill an Olympic-size swimming pool.”
Great article Mike. Once we learn how to use skype, we can start having shared club meetings and membership drives. There are wonderful things about the media-age. Getting statistics and using comparisons is just the beginning.
Are you able to find out and relate how many other language clubs there are?
Thanks, Margie. Remember that current rules require regular club meetings to be face to face. There’s a LOT of context lost when meeting through video, no matter how good it is.
While I long ago suggested that clubs should report what language(s) they use in meetings, it’s not been implemented. It would be very useful in the “find a club” tool, so people can find a club that they’re able to communicate in.
Very interesting.
I have no interest in numbers unless they’re made visible, so I appreciate the efforts you & others make to visualize Toastmasters numbers.
Toastmasters numbers I haven’t been able to see, let alone retrieve, are those that describe the impact of Toastmasters over time… in other words,
=> How many unique members has Toastmasters served over time.
=> How many new-to-Toastmasters members have been added per year
Interesting questions, but ones that cannot be answered outside of WHQ (if you mean to exclude dual members in your second question). The data just is not available, it would require access to individual membership records to answer this one.