{"id":784,"date":"2012-03-15T17:36:42","date_gmt":"2012-03-15T22:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/?p=784"},"modified":"2012-04-19T23:42:13","modified_gmt":"2012-04-20T04:42:13","slug":"how-big-is-toastmasters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/15\/how-big-is-toastmasters\/","title":{"rendered":"How big is Toastmasters?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>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?<\/p>\n

300,000 members is the same size as the population of Cincinnati, Ohio (the site of the 2013 international convention<\/a>).\u00a0 If everyone were lined up holding hands in a human chain, we would reach from Chicago to Detroit.<\/p>\n

The biggest country with no Toastmasters club is Bangladesh, the 9th largest by population, 142 million potential members.\u00a0 Next is Vietnam with 87 million, and Iran with 76 million.\u00a0 The U.S. has the most clubs, about 8,400.<\/p>\n

The most popular meeting day is Wednesday, over 3,500 clubs, followed closely by Tuesday and Thursday.\u00a0 I would estimate that on any given Wednesday night, there are over 1,000 clubs meeting simultaneously.<\/p>\n

The city with the most clubs is Singapore with 178, followed by Toronto (138, not counting metro areas), Washington (136) and Houston (134).<\/p>\n

There were about 37,000 CC and AC awards issued last year, that’s an average of about 1,000 manual speeches a day.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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!).<\/p>\n

With more than 1,100 DTMs awarded each year, that’s over three every day!<\/p>\n

Toastmasters is over 88 years old now.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>).<\/p>\n

So there’s another perspective on Toastmasters!\u00a0 What examples would you use to illustrate how big Toastmasters is?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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).\u00a0 If everyone were lined up holding hands in a human chain, we would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-784","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous-toastmasters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":808,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784\/revisions\/808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mikeraffety.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}