Time has this amazing thing of just escaping without you even realising it. I love Christmas and cannot wait for the end of December to be here when we’re celebrating with our friends and family.
Steve Vear, DTM
Program Quality Director 2023-24
PS – We have started the process of separating our external and internal communications on YouTube to enable us to benefit from YouTube’s algorithms to promote our external content and enable potential members to find us. You may find our channels here.
Dear members,
We are now a quarter way through our Toastmasters’ year, and let us congratulate ourselves for the achievements our clubs have made so far this year. I am delighted that many of our clubs have been successful in recruiting new members and in registering Pathways education awards.
We held our first District Council meeting where our Club Presidents and Vice Presidents of Education voted with our District Executive Committee for all Area, Division and District contests to take place as hybrid events this year. I have already attended two very well organised and managed club contests with new members stepping up and entering their contest often with enormous success. This is especially pleasing as it shows that new members feel comfortable enough in many clubs to take what many outside Toastmasters perceive as being a huge risk or challenge. This speaks highly to how many clubs have a welcoming, open, and friendly atmosphere which encourages people both to join and then take part in club meetings and contests.
I know that several Area and Division Directors are planning their contests either for later this month or in November, which gives everyone a wonderful opportunity to network and to support their club members as they strive to reach the next level of the Humorous Speech and Table Topics contests.
Your District team has also submitted and received approval from Toastmasters International HQ, our District Success Plan, budget, marketing, and communications plans. This is a major milestone. It means our District can become a distinguished district at the end of the year once again.
I am pleased that Steve has been running the District Officer Training over the course of the summer as Programme Quality Director. 95% of our Area and Division Directors attended training. It was especially interesting that the last-minute training which Steve organised, attracted District Officers from District 95 (Germany and Scandinavia), and allowed us to exchange ideas, to learn from them and for them to learn from us. This highlights the importance of encouraging members and Club Officers to visit other clubs to network and increase the speed of their personal development as members learn to speak in front of new audiences or share best practices between clubs.
It is also pleasing that Mo, our Club Growth Director, has had successes in this first quarter, with two new clubs, Sustainable Speakers and Medidata EMEA, chartering. Several clubs that had been suspended have now become clubs in good standing again. I know that Mo has a strong pipeline of club leads and prospects and is asking for your help with demonstration meetings for potential new clubs and as mentors for recently chartered clubs.
I hope that you enjoy the contest season currently underway.
Best regards
Diane
By the time you will be reading this article, we will be well into contest season as clubs around our District are taking part in the Humorous Speech and Table Topics Contests. Contests offer us an important variation to our club agenda – one of the runners up in the International Speech Contest recently reflected that the only way to really improve is to compete and to stand alongside other contestants to learn from them and to strive to do better.
It is true that this is one of the ways that we can improve – but the truth is that Toastmasters is a personal journey. Some people join to develop public speaking skills, some join to develop leadership skills, some join to try and win contests, and sometimes people just join for a new social network.
I want to tell you about my personal trainer Joe. Joe is a really capable and confident guy in the gym environment. He is at home around the gym, he knows how every machine and bit of equipment works. He works with clients like me all the time and helps them achieve their goals. But Joe decided that he wanted to become a better speaker. Not just because he had listened to me ‘talk up Toastmasters’ in many of my sessions with him, and not just because he was getting married soon but because he wanted to improve.
When Joe visited the club, he would soon join, he was met with warmth, encouragement and soon saw for himself what the Toastmasters program could offer him. We recently had a conversation about how the Pathways program has supported him and how it feels genuine excitement about planning his next speech. Joe is also competitive and does not mind the odd bit of recognition and has said he wants to achieve a Triple Crown.
Why did I tell you about Joe?
It is because just using one member as an example, he visited because a Toastmaster member encouraged him to try it. He joined because of the quality of experience that his club offered him, and he enrolled on Pathways and discovered what a fantastic journey it really can be.
Have a think about who you can encourage to visit your club, how you can contribute to the quality of your club – and do check whether you or members of your club has correctly enrolled on Pathways – 800 of our members are still missing out!
For those club or district officers that are responsible for putting on contests this time of year, first of all thank you for your efforts in this important area, but please don’t forget to check the latest edition of the speech contest rulebook to ensure we don’t have any problems along the way.
If you do have any questions about contests – please do not hesitate to get into contact!
Best of luck to all contestants and I look forward to seeing the Area winners at a Division contest soon!
Steve Vear DTM
Program Quality Director
You may have seen on Social Media channels the return of our “Thanks Toastmasters” membership building campaign after I underpinned our district website and made coding improvements. Many thanks to our past PR Manager Susan Rayner without whose help I’d still be scratching my head. The fulcrum for our campaign is our Club Finder which lives at the web address included on the adverts: https://d91toastmasters.org.uk/find. I’ve also included the club finder here for you to try out. Clubs have been categorised according to the day of the week on which they meet and whether they meet online or have hybrid meetings.
Please check that your club information is correct and shown as you would like it to be. Please update the details at TI Club Central if needed and then let me know so that I can update them here. If your club is missing, it is either because it has restricted membership (this applies to many of our corporate clubs), or because it has no email address on record, and enquiries on our website cannot be forwarded to you.
Our back catalogue of “Thanks Toastmasters” adverts is in the Digital Templates page of our website. We are using them on our district external PR channels and we would encourage you to use them too. We will be augmenting them with new material and suggest you bookmark the page in your browser and check for updates occasionally. Our first features Toastmaster Tom Bailey. Please read his article in this newsletter.
In my past career, I sold Digital Analytics solutions. It’s true that high profile brands think nothing of spending six figure amounts on Digital Analytics every year. None the less, it came as a surprise to me just how few companies would engage with us, with our under 5000 members and modest budget of a fraction of the cost of one postage stamp per member, looking for a better solution. Customer Relationship Management vendors not engaging? It’s their business to create engagement! There was evidently a learning point to tease out.
I estimated Toastmasters International’s global revenues based on our membership subscriptions and joining fees. I was very surprised to find that if TI globally were a UK Educational charity, it would not even rank within the top 300. I estimated that we would fall about 306th, just ahead of centuries old Queens College, Cambridge, and just behind 15 years old Help for Heroes. Our District 91 represents just 1.5% of TI’s total.
Thanks Toastmasters!
Best wishes,
