We will be adding more articles to this page. To start: here are articles on speaking and articles giving personal views on the on the power of Toastmasters and an exciting joint meeting between London and Namibia.
Thank you to all those who completed our on-line survey on PR and Comms. The survey was to help the District Leadership Team (DLT) answer two key questions:
1. Does the annual cost of our external PR company represent good value for money?
2. What is the most effective way of communicating on-line with our members?
My analyses and report follows.
Looking Back
Recently the DLT (District Leadership Team) and Division Directors, met to review the first half of the Toastmasters year. The theme for the day was around planning, specifically around the quote: “failing to plan, is planning to fail”.
Imagine a moment, it’s June 2018 and your club has had a brilliant year. You are overflowing with new members whose boundless energies led to the creation of countless new friendships and stories to remember for a lifetime! Pathways came and everyone is loving it so far, Toastmasters reimagined has arrived and your efforts in marketing it have paid off tremendously. Another open-house meeting is already on the cards for the summer and eagers members fancy a leadership challenge of a new sorts by launching a new club.
This story will become your story when your club will start 2018 with a bang as loud as sonic boom! There’s a lot you can do to make it happen and most of it is super simple, see below.
This month Nigel, our PR Manager, chatted with Beauty Zindi, our D91 Finance Manager. Beauty has been very busy keeping the DLT in check, introducing a more streamlined finance processes and securing our district budget.
Hi, you have both an unusual forename and surname, where do they come from?
Beauty means exactly what it means in the English language. In Zimbabwe a lot of parents give their children English adjectives as names. Beauty is a common first name in Zimbabwe, but in the UK it gives me celebrity status. I have a middle name – Chiwoneso which means mirror or torch light. As for my surname, according to my late grandfather it is made up of two Zimbabwean ideophones “zi” and “ndi” (pronounced like in candy). “Zi” in this sense is similar to the “zzzzzz” sound made by bees and it means unsettled, roaming about, whereas “ndi” is the opposite. My grandfather told me that his great grand parents had to travel from place to place before they found a place they could call their own. So after they settled, they said to themselves they had been “zzzzz” and they had become settled, therefore “ndi”. They brought the two ideophones together to make the name Zindi. In Zimbabwe there is a place called Zindi where we are considered royalty – okay every African considers themselves royalty!
As the District 91 PR Manager, I receive requests for speakers from local interest groups, clubs and institutions for example Oddfellows, London Ashridge Circle, Rotary and WI. Such organisations usually request a list of speakers and their topics. My solution is to create a page on our website with available speakers that I can point them to – a kind of Speakers Bureau.
The intention is to offer our members the opportunity to speak outside of their Toastmasters clubs and gain even more experience of public speaking. However, you will of course be representing Toastmasters. A fine balance is therefore required on quality and eagerness. As a consequence, I have drafted some criteria for those wishing to be listed in the Speakers Bureau.