Quality Club Meetings: Top Ten Tips for a Tip-Top Club 1. Prepare the schedule in advance: It’s best to prepare the schedule a few weeks in advance, particularly for bigger roles like prepared speeches and the Toastmaster of the evening. This helps you divide up the speaking roles fairly, looks more professional and saves time in the long run. It also lets you hand over responsibility for the meeting to the Toastmaster in advance.
2. Accommodate people’s wishes, but tell them what to do too: In writing the schedule, find out what your members want and take it into account. For example, if someone wants to finish their CTM this year and there’s time in the schedule for them to do so, then give them enough speaking slots. But tell them what to do too: allocate the slots for prepared speeches fairly, and push people into roles that are less desirable or outside their comfort zone.
3. Have regular educational sessions: New members learn a lot from educational sessions, which you could typically run every meeting or every other meeting. The Better Speaker series is particularly useful, as are some of the modules in the Successful Club series. Your more experienced members can write their own educational speeches too.
4. Make sure everyone prepares their role in advance: It’s good for the club to have a culture where everyone’s expected to prepare properly. This includes the obvious roles like speeches and Toastmaster of the evening, but also roles like timer and grammarian that are often given to new members. The club can help a lot by making sure everyone knows what they’re doing.
5. Decide what to do about cancellations: Cancellations are often a nuisance. Sometimes they’re unavoidable (for example, last-minute business meetings), but often they aren’t. Ways to deal with them include making a list of members prepared to speak at short notice, insisting that people find someone to swap with, and refusing to schedule people for a while after they cancel.
6. Balance formality and informality: Formality encourages us to do everything properly; it also stresses us a little, and stretches us as a result. But informality helps us enjoy the meeting and encourages us to turn up. It’s best to have a good balance between the two, and that’s mainly the responsibility of the Toastmaster of the evening.
7. Look after guests and new members: Assign someone to look after every guest, make them feel welcome and explain what’s going on. Show how we improve by membership of Toastmasters: this is easier if the meeting has a mix of new and experienced speakers. Don’t be afraid of giving them application forms at the end of the meeting. And don’t neglect your newer members either.
8. Make sure every member gets to speak: Ask your members to sign in at the start of the meeting, so that you can find out who’s assigned for a role and who isn’t, and then make sure that Chris Cox, October 2006, with acknowledgements to Simon Bragg, Teresa Dukes and David McNaughter.
the Table Topics master gives a topic to everyone without a role. And if you give topics to guests or ask if they’d like to volunteer for one, then make sure this applies to all the guests too.
9. Keep to time: Make sure the Toastmaster plans the timing of the evening, knows how much they can ad-lib and sticks to it. Make sure speakers stick to their allocated times. And make sure your club has a policy for roles like general evaluator, whose timing isn’t specified by Toastmasters.
10. Give rigorous evaluations: Experienced evaluators read the manual before the meeting, actively listen to the speech, commend the things the speaker did well and, most important of all, make recommendations for how the speaker could improve. But feedback doesn’t only come from the named evaluators: if the club uses Toastmasters’ evaluation slips, then the speaker can receive some brief feedback from everyone at the meeting.
11. Drink beer: Finally, hold your meetings in a place with a bar, and go there after the meeting. If they throw you out at closing time, you’re doing something right.
Chris Cox, October 2006, with acknowledgements to Simon Bragg, Teresa Dukes and David McNaughter.