Author: Mike Raffety

Candidate for Toastmasters International Second Vice President, 2011-12

Large community club spin-offs

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I’ve been involved in building many new clubs, both community and company, and they tend to take rather different paths.  Company clubs are relatively easy to build, but also easy to lose (e.g., management changes priorities for time and/or funding).  Community clubs can be a challenge to build, but given a good start, tend to stick around a long time.

One technique I’ve seen work well for building community clubs is to grow an existing club so large that it can spin off a new club.  This method allows you to gradually grow the “new” club from within the existing one, and every guest sees what a good strong club looks like.  The more traditional approach with a community club might start with a handful of people (which can result in difficulty producing a good meeting), and then new people sign up largely on faith that it will eventually charter.

Once a club reaches 40+ members, spinning off the new club is mostly a matter of paperwork; the hardest part, the membership building, is done!  Things to decide are which members go into the second club (needs to be a good mix of new and old), club officers, and a new club name.  The only money is the $125 club charter fee.

Selling this to the club can be quite an exercise in leadership though.  The biggest concerns I would discuss are:

  • Club officer workload: How does the VP-E schedule 40+ members, finding a big enough room, collecting dues from so many, etc.
  • Meeting speech slots: Even in a weekly club with 5 speeches per meeting, that’s 250 slots a year, divided by 40 members, means each members gets to speak an average of six times a year, once every two months!
  • Leadership opportunities: A second club means the members now have 14 officer positions for practicing leadership instead of 7.
  • Lost membership: Many large clubs have a remarkably high member turnover rate, since they are unable to schedule members to speak often enough, and they can feel like a small cog in a big machine.
  • Members must feel welcome to visit back and forth between the two clubs regardless of which club they’re formally paying dues in.
  • Clubs may meet no more than once a week: It’s not in the club constitution and bylaws, but WHQ has issued statements that a club may not regularly meet more often.

I believe that the highest recognition of a club’s quality is that it is so successful, it spins off new clubs (perhaps regularly!).

Which clubs are eligible for this process?  You can find a list for your district on the page below, the last bullet at the bottom (select your district number from the menu):

http://mikeraffety.com/reports.shtml

Members vs. customers

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Over the years, I’ve noticed that some of our members really don’t act like members. They act like customers. They get in with specific goals, get what they want, and get out. They don’t want to help run the place, they just want to be customers!

Imagine what might happen if you walked into a retail shop and were treated as a “member”.  The people already there start asking you questions about what they should inventory, what their opening hours should be, whether so-and-so should be promoted to store manager!

Now, this might be something you really like, if it’s a store you feel passionately about, and want to make a big part of your life (maybe Apple Computer?).  But for many, they just want to buy a package of cookies and a carton of milk and get on with their life.

Apply this to Toastmasters.  Some of our members don’t want to help run the place, and that’s OK!  Sure, make them aware of what they’re missing out on, but don’t press on endlessly.  They may not be our future leaders (yet), but others will be.

When you talk to someone who’s just joined, ask them how involved they want to be.  Do they just want to work on some manual speeches, overcome some verbal tics, gain some confidence speaking (customer), or do they have an interest in helping run our organization, be a mentor or club officer, learn leadership skills, and help others (member)?

We need to make sure we have what our customers need — speaking opportunities, strong evaluations, opportunities for learning specific skills, even contests.  No matter how they join, ask what they’re looking for.  Match it up against our offerings.  Be sure they know we can help them with what they’re joining for, regardless of whether they are a customer or a member.

In my experience, very few people join Toastmasters as a member — they start as a customer (despite paying “membership dues”!), and then after a few meetings, a few months, even a few years, once they find out all that we offer, then they become “members”!

By the way, if you’re reading this, you’re probably a member, not just a customer!

Toastmasters quiz: Where in the world is District 87?

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I’ll admit it … for many district numbers, I have NO idea where they are.  But I better learn them.  Being a computer guy, I figured a little quiz would make it fun and easy.

Think you know what district Rhode Island belongs to?  Try this quiz (the questions change each time):

http://mikeraffety.com/GeoQuiz.cgi

Add a comment here with your score, and any ideas you have for another quiz!  I’m already planning a Toastmasters trivia quiz too.

P.S.  D87 is the new district covering East Malaysia, Indonesia and Brunei, split off from D51 on July 1, 2010.

The importance of club web sites

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In my experience, “open” clubs (ones open to anyone interested, no membership qualifications) live or die by a good web site.  A community club lacking a good web site is missing out on guests who may become members.

Clubs have the opportunity to list an official web site as part of their directory information with Toastmasters International.  I validated those listings and for each district, produced a list of clubs where the published web site either doesn’t work, or (for open clubs) there’s no web site listed at all.

Take a look at http://mikeraffety.com/reports.html (about halfway down) — pick your district, and see what clubs have web sites listed that don’t work, or almost as bad, open clubs that have no web site at all.  Encourage those clubs to build a working web site, and I am certain that the guests will show up.

What goes into a good club web site, and frequent updates, is a whole ‘nother issue to talk about another time.

Toastmasters legacy?

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Somewhere around the time that I was moving into district leadership, I think it was when I was running for Lt. Gov’r of Marketing (LGM), I was mentioning Toastmasters more often to family and friends, and my father casually mentioned that he had been a Toastmaster for a while.

He’d never talked about it before, and it turns out I was just 2-3 years old when he was involved.  He thinks it was at most 6 months one winter, then the spring planting season on the farm required him to miss a few months, and he never went back.  He says he did maybe 2-3 speeches, and was favorably impressed with it, it just didn’t fit into a farmer’s schedule.

Now, he’s a member of another college/community organization that requires him to write and deliver (orally) a major paper (usually historical in nature) once every two years.

The Toastmasters club in the town I grew up in is long defunct, but with a college there (central Iowa), they should try one again.  It’s too far away for me to provide any sort of direct support though.

I guess that makes me a Toastmasters “legacy”!

Long-term new club retention

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How well are we doing with retention of new clubs?  I looked at clubs that chartered in the 2007-08 year (two years ago) three different ways, by club type, open/group-specific, and whether they were advanced.  (Every Toastmasters club has these three different characteristics; yes, you can have a “company open” club, or a “community group-specific” club.)

Of those clubs chartered two years ago, as of last month, we had lost 20% of the nearly-1000 new clubs (how does that compare to your district?).  Out of that, we lost 27% of the company clubs, but just 10% of the community clubs.

Looking at the same clubs a different way, we lost 23% of the group-specific clubs (i.e., closed, or organization-aligned), while we lost just 14% of the open (typically community, but not always) clubs.

Out of 37 advanced clubs chartered that year, we’ve lost just one, 2.7% (it was in Taiwan).

Conclusion:  It does appear that closed/company/group-specific clubs are much harder to retain, perhaps 2-3 times higher failure rate, over that first two years, which is the hardest time for a club.  Club mentors are so important (though I don’t have data to prove that).

Club type          Lost Total  Percent
Company             148   558   26.52%
Community            34   325   10.46%
College               6    33   18.18%
Other/Specialized     3    24   12.50%
Govt Agency           3    32    9.38%
Correctional Inst     1     5   20.00%
Military              1     3   33.33%
Church                1     5   20.00%

Open/group specific
Group Specific      149   652   22.85%
Open                 47   332   14.16%

Advanced
N                   195   946   20.61%
Y                     1    37    2.70%

Why three votes for Second Vice President?

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This year’s annual business meeting (Saturday, Aug. 14, 2010) went on for more than four hours, almost entirely due to the time required to count votes, most especially for holding two extra votes for Second Vice President.

There’s an easy solution to this.  Well, two solutions:

  1. Move to an electronic voting method.
  2. Use preferential voting.

The electronic voting can be done in many different ways, but I would recommend a solution similar to how many states hold elections today, with an optical scan voting system, where the voters fill in a bubble or connect a line on a paper ballot to indicate their preferences.  This process is simple, requires no expensive electronics in the voters’ hands, and can be easily audited afterward.

Preferential voting is the key though, and it’s something we already use — for speech contests!  Speech contest judges mark their first three choices, and tie-breakers rank all the contestants.  We can do the same thing in our elections, especially with electronic vote counting.  When a “re-vote” is needed, the computer ballot scanner can do so automatically (and instantaneously), ignoring the dropped candidate.  (You could do preferential vote counting by hand, but it would be laborious, having to examine each ballot and skip any dropped candidates for the voter’s next choice.)

With the International Leadership Committee (ILC) from Global Representation and Support bringing us more and more qualified candidates, multiple re-votes will be more and more common.  Without these improvements, we’ll face  interminable business meetings, waiting for results and then voting yet again on the candidates.  Putting these steps in place will also allow the ILC (and RLCs?) to be more comfortable with presenting the voters with three choices to consider, instead of just two.

By simplifying the election process to a single ballot, we might even achieve Parliamentarian Herb Nowlin’s dream of an election with no spoiled or illegal ballots!

Toastmasters store trivia

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I’ve heard several people complain that the new “catalog” doesn’t include prices, which does make it easier to be flexible on prices (instead of having to fix them for a full year).  I decided to create a “store price sheet”, which just lists the items with a short description, item number (with link to the TI store page), and price.  Note that it does NOT update with new prices automatically, it’s a snapshot of today’s prices.

http://mikeraffety.com/StorePricesSorted.html

What’s the most expensive item TI sells?  The timing signal light, $185, followed by the “How to Write and Deliver Great Speeches (DVD/Study Guide)” ($149).

How to Write and Deliver Great Speeches (DVD/Study Guide)

Countries with the most membership change

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I saw an interesting discussion on LinkedIn asking about what areas experienced the most membership growth — or loss.  I modified my club type script and ran it against the 2009-10 data, and got some interesting data.

First, to no great surprise, the country with the greatest loss was Haiti, down 323 members (net change, July 1, 2009, to June 30, 2010).  Not far after that was Taiwan (down 166), Netherland Antilles (down 47), and Kuwait (down 29).

The biggest gains were United States with 1,962 members (net increase), Canada (up 1,079 members), India (920 members, no surprise there!), China (881 members), Australia (620), and Malaysia (481).

Within the US, Virginia had the biggest net membership loss (down 197 members), Alabama (down 116), and Indiana (down 103).  The biggest increases were California (up 1,962 members!), Texas (up 1,219), Florida (up 935), New York (up 766), and Illinois (up 504).

Here’s a graphic showing the data — brighter green is more total members added in 2009-10 (NOT adjusted for population!).

ACTHA Certified Leader

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I’ve been going to some evening classes about how to run a condominium association, and I passed all the tests!  I’m now an “ACTHA Certified Leader”!  I’ve been on the board of my condo association since the developer turned it over to us in about 2004 or 2005, and have been the board secretary for a couple of years now.

It’s certainly a challenge building a consensus among the board members at times!  But my home is my biggest investment, and the upkeep on a condo is largely under the domain of the association board, so I’ve always thought it important to be involved with that.