Author: Mike Raffety

Candidate for Toastmasters International Second Vice President, 2011-12

Contest questions: What would YOU do?

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Contests are one of the easiest places to make a mistake — and yet, one of the most important events to get right, especially for members who are planning on becoming the World Champion of Public Speaking!  Here’s a few scenarios to think about.  What would YOU do?

Some of them have “right” answers per the rules, some have “right” answers per most peoples’ understanding of fairness … and some have no good answer at all.  Regardless, they are likely to start a good conversation at contest training.

Contest program & preparation

Do you include contestant names on the program?  Speech title?  Their club name and number?  Educational award level (like CC or DTM)?  Title (like club president or past district governor)?

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How big is Toastmasters?

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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.

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One club, one year, 57 educational awards!

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Shael Stonebridge chatted with me via Skype about his club.  He was the VP-Education last year for the club that earned the most leadership awards for any single club, 32, including 17 CLs, plus 23 communication awards, ending the year with 29 members (not a huge club).

Mike: Good evening, Shael!  So tell us about your club?

Shael: Langley Morning Toastmasters is in Langley, British Columbia, Canada, and we meet at 7 AM on Tuesdays.  We’re known for educational awards!

Mike: Educational awards?  How so?

Shael: LMT earned 57 Educational awards in the last Toastmasters year!

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Musings on Modern Media

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Social media collageThe use of “social media” is a controversial topic in the context of international officer and director campaign policy. The current policy has some interesting limitations on what a candidate can do. I’d like to explore a few of them here. First, let’s consider the underpinnings of the policy, as I understand them (these aren’t spelled out anywhere):

  • Keeping costs down certainly makes sense. This is expressed through rules like no hospitality suites and limiting the attendance of Toastmasters events outside one’s home region. I understand that up to 10-15 years ago, candidates for international office sometimes threw extravagant parties at the conventions with immense amounts of food and drink.

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Real life: Leaving NO clubs behind!

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Anne Myers, DTM, District 49 Governor for last year (2010-11) was kind enough to sit down with me for an interview via Skype.

Mike: Good morning, Anne!  So D49 did something last year that no other district achieved — you renewed every single club in the district, no clubs lost.  How did you do it?

Anne: We can look at two areas of focus, one is the new clubs that are formed and the other is the existing clubs, like other districts.  I believe the biggest success we have in not losing clubs is that for new clubs, we focus on prescreening new clubs to ensure they are able to be sustained for the long term and not just a short term fix for a situation.  Case in point, we had a corporate contact approach us where the group only wanted to form for help in doing some short term presentations.

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Districts with NO club loss?

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We make a big deal about districts that build 30-40 or more new clubs in a year, but what about districts that lost zero clubs?  I think that’s a pretty amazing accomplishment.  And in 2010-11, we had just one district achieve that — D49 (Hawaii).  They started the year with 64 clubs, added one new club in October 2010, and renewed every single one of those 65 clubs, 100% retention!

The year before (2009-10), just one district did it as well, D33 (central California and southern Nevada), but they lost 4 clubs this year.  (Here is my post on this topic a year ago.)

What’s rather interesting is that of the three districts presented with the President’s Extension award last month (August 2011) in Las Vegas (for the largest net club increase), they had some rather dismal retention rates.  They were closing clubs in large numbers.  The full report is here: http://mikeraffety.com/NoClubLoss.html.

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What’s it cost to run for Second Vice President?

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Similarly to when I ran for ID, I’m going to publish what it cost to run for Second Vice President, for the benefit of anyone who may follow in my shoes.  Here’s the entry for the ID costs.

The first step was the announcement at the end of the August 2010 convention.  I was an outgoing director, so the convention registration and hotel costs were reduced; most would probably not count that as part of the campaign.  However, I had announcement cards to hand out on Saturday night, since that would be my only chance to see most of the voters before the next annual convention.  2,500 cards cost $126 (M13 Graphics is great!).

I made a strategic decision to not attend any district conferences other than my own district.  The campaign rules limit me to attending only Toastmasters events in my home region, and I already had good relationships with the leaders in all eight districts.  I felt the expensive weekends that might be spent on those would be better used to reach out to other districts with phone calls.  This meant I had essentially zero travel costs (other than the convention itself), a sharp contrast to my ID campaign (which was mostly travel costs, within the region).

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Messages heard at the annual convention

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I met with over 60 districts during five days (it was quite a marathon, at 20 minutes each for 4-6 hours at a time on end), and there were some common and reasonable concerns I’d like to document here.

  1. We need some form of club officer training for distant clubs.  I believe we could set a policy limiting it to clubs 50 miles or more from any district-sponsored training (so the majority of clubs would continue to attend the existing face-to-face training).  The distance training could either be an interactive videoconference with existing district training (as D21 has been piloting for three years), or it could be WHQ-produced computer-based training.  For the latter, it would need to be participatory, asking questions of understanding along the way (but not a “test”), so someone doesn’t just hit “play”, go do their laundry, and come back an hour later, all “trained”.  Also, I think it would be reasonable to require that all seven officers be trained if the club chooses this option. Continue reading “Messages heard at the annual convention” →

Why I’m running from the floor

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Last November, I declared my candidacy for Second Vice President of Toastmasters International, along with 7-8 other people.  This past February, the ILC (International Leadership Committee) reviewed all applications plus the results of the IOCS (International Officer Candidate Survey) sent out to top district and international leaders.

The ILC slated Mohammed Murad and Jim Kokocki.   The reasons for the ILC’s choices will never be known as its deliberations are secret.  That’s OK with me.

I was honored to receive the highest number of votes in the IOCS, and as a result, I decided in February to continue my campaign with a run from the floor.  A floor candidate won the contested officer position for each of the last two years, so we’ll just make it three consecutive years!  It does mean that:

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Getting members OUT of their club!

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Do you remember the first time you visited a new club?  Was the agenda in a different order, were there different meeting roles, did the evaluations just “feel different”?

Getting the member out of the club is a critical step to building long-term enthusiasm for Toastmasters.  Usually the focus is on going to officer training, speech contests, and district conferences, but what about visiting other clubs?

The advantage to club visits is that there are many more opportunities (every week, not a few times a year), and they’re likely closer to the member as well.

Why visit other clubs?

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