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Guiding Stars: Insights from Region 10 Advisor, Lilian Shaftacola, on Navigating Toastmasters’ Path to Excellence

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What does a Region Advisor do and how does your role ultimately benefit club members?

As the current Region 10 Advisor, I am using my experience to guide the leaders of our eight Districts as they navigate their way through this program year. My objective is to encourage them to develop innovative strategies that will ensure that their Districts achieve high member retention and club growth while maintaining high quality clubs that can add value to their members.

 

How do you recommend that clubs provide an enriching experience for their members?

The objective of a club should always be to find ways to support every single member and allow them to benefit from the best possible experience. I always advise the clubs to apply the moments of truth, they will never go wrong there. A few additional tips are: The club leaders should aim to be very inclusive, always providing a welcoming environment for guests and members alike. All present should be encouraged to speak up and participate during the meeting. There should be plenty of feedback, always delivered in a very supportive manner. It is also vital that a club ensures it is meeting its members’ needs (which could be changing over time). Therefore, I would suggest checking-in with them on a regular basis, to ask: “what is working, what could be done better?”

 

How did you first join Toastmasters and what has encouraged you to remain an active member after so many years?

Almost 25 years ago, I was invited by a friend to accompany them to a dinner on a Friday night. It seemed like a fairly standard invitation at first but then I realized that we were actually going to a club meeting to listen to people challenge themselves by delivering speeches. I had never heard of the Toastmasters organization before that night and I was very surprised to see so many people from different walks of life giving up their Friday evening to speak in public! I felt quite uncomfortable at first but I ended up being drawn in by the welcoming atmosphere and the multiple opportunities for growth offered. I am still active after so many years because my journey within Toastmasters has been such a rewarding one and I have loved every step of the way. While I did originally join solely to improve my public speaking skills, I have, over the years, also appreciated the leadership roles I have taken on that allowed me to develop further.

 

What motivates you to keep serving the organization and how do you stay connected to the member experience?

The Toastmasters organization has given me so much over the past years that I am really enjoying the opportunity to offer something back by finding ways to support others in their development. The mentoring experience remains an especially rewarding one for me and nothing makes me happier than seeing my mentees achieve their goals. I now have a number of mentees scattered throughout Europe and, of course, I am also working closely with the District Leaders in Region 10. At the same time, I love getting to know as many members as possible – over the last few months I have been fortunate to find myself spending time with many wonderful people. I am currently sponsoring a prospect club and I belong to two established, successful clubs in different Districts but I also love attending the meetings of other clubs. For example, when I was visiting London last week, I thoroughly enjoyed visiting four very different clubs, discussing with their members and listening to their views.

 

Leadership is a key aspect of Toastmasters. What advice would you give to members who are hesitant about stepping into leadership roles within their club?

There is so much value to be gained from stepping into such roles as you can apply the leadership lessons learned in Toastmasters to your professional life. Think of it as an opportunity to practice leadership skills in a safe, non-judgmental environment. What could be better? The beauty of it is that you never know where this leadership journey could end up taking you. Therefore, do not overthink it. Just say yes and go for the challenge!

 

Can you share a success story from a club that overcame challenges and became stronger? What could members learn from this?

I have in mind a certain club that catered mainly to an expatriate community within its country. Therefore, it would experience high turnover as a significant portion of its membership base would leave the country every year. At some point, this club found itself in a very precarious position with the original sponsors also having moved on. There were only 4 members left at that stage and there was very little interest from guests. Even the District leadership team had essentially written off the club but 2 of the remaining members really believed in it and fought to keep it alive. They first worked hard to diversify their membership base, encouraging more locals to join. They then held a number online sessions which allowed them to invite special guests from all over the world. For nine months they worked with dedication to achieve their goal of 20+ active members. Today the club is thriving again thanks to their enthusiasm and determination. The message here is that you do not need to have an army of people to save a club but you do have to have at least one person who genuinely cares and will fight for it.

 

Do you have any final words to share with members who are just starting out on their Toastmasters journey?

Dear new members, I envy you as you start out – you have such a great journey ahead of you, please do not waste one second of it. Do take on as many different roles as possible within the organization and ensure that you always have an experienced mentor by your side to support you. Just don’t give up and you will be amazed by what you will end up accomplishing. Trust me on this – during my twenty-five years as a member, I have seen the Toastmasters organization work its magic on so many people all over the world.

Toastmasters Recruitment Drive at South Croydon Jobs Fair

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On the 27th November 2024, a dedicated team in Division 8 put up a Toastmasters’ banner and raised awareness of the benefits of joining Toastmasters International. This was their third trip to Job Fairs by the Bridge in South London. The team spent three hours, talking and introducing attendees Toastmasters and how their speaking skills can develop and improve with our help. We look forward to meeting them at a club near you!

 

Here are some highlights and feedback from some of our members that served on the day:

Suzy Kearn ,VPPR  from Croydon Communicators :

The day was an enjoyable experience for both TM’s and potential guests. The event was packed and a great opportunity to get Toastmasters known and possible new members, now or in the future.

 

 

Sabeer the Division B8 Area Director had this to say:

It has been an amazing experience for me. The teamwork was incredible and time went by so quickly and the  best part was we were all having a great time, engaging/ talking with participants at the job fair. I was surprised to learn that not many people knew about Toastmaster which would make it a perfect reason why we were there.

Overall, been an amazing experience for me and thank you for having me.

Wendy Gibson VPE from Purley Speakers had this to say.

Positive Takeaways:

  • High Attendance: The event was well-attended, providing plenty of opportunities to engage with a diverse group of potential new members.
  • Effective Teamwork: Our team worked seamlessly together, with everyone contributing positively to the event. We were able to engage attendees without anyone needing to wait for attention, thanks to our well-staffed table.
  • Positive Energy and Engagement: We arrived with enthusiasm and maintained a friendly, approachable attitude throughout the day. This helped us make meaningful connections, and we successfully gathered numerous contact details.
  • Strong Collaboration Across Clubs: It was a great opportunity to meet members from other clubs and work together as a unified team. Despite being new to each other, we gelled quickly, making the event enjoyable and productive
  • Slow Foot Traffic as an Advantage: The crowded corridor slowed the pace of attendees, which gave us more time to capture their attention and engage with them, ensuring we spoke to more people than we might have otherwise.

Challenges:

  • Limited Space: The small table and lack of seating made it difficult to organise materials and rest comfortably. However, this did encourage more standing interactions, which could be seen as an advantage in making our table more approachable.

This was a super event, and we hope to do many more of these in the future, and to continue to inspire everyone around us.  Are you inspired to do similar at your local business fair?

 

Did you intend to unsubscribe?

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Did you intend to unsubscribe?

At District 91 Toastmasters we do our very best to keep in regular touch with you, our fellow members. Unfortunately, we are aware that many email systems, especially those for corporate and academic institutions, visit hyperlinks in incoming email messages automatically for protection purposes. This affects about nine percent of our members. As a small voluntary organisation, we also rely on all our members’ engagement to thrive and provide relevant and interesting content. We have established that two thirds of all apparent engagement is in fact generated robotically by these protection services. The effects are disproportionate and our website analytics have been rendered meaningless. 

An unfortunate consequence of this can be that the unsubscribe link in our email footer gets visited and consequently you may become unsubscribed from our mailings. We are concerned that this may happen without your knowledge or consent and although it occurs beyond our control, we are nonetheless looking for an effective solution to this issue. The typical pattern of behaviour for automated unsubscribes is that the follow-up survey is not completed.

Whilst it is unfortunate when any member becomes unsubscribed in this way, it can also have consequences detrimental to the good governance of our district. If you are serving as Club President or Vice President of Education, you are a member of our District Council, the supreme decision making body in our district. If you are serving as a District Officer, you are a member of both our District Council and of our District Executive Committee. In both cases, meetings are notified at least four weeks in advance and members of the body need to register their attendance and submit business motions in advance. The meetings must also be quorate in order to conduct business. Thus, an unintended consequence of an automated unsubscribe may be that you become unaware of meetings, although they are also posted on our district calendar, resulting in your club becoming disenfranchised from our decision making process.

What are we doing about it?

Our approach has three aspects. Firstly, if you have engaged with both our email and our website before becoming unsubscribed, then you have a cookie stored in your web browser and we can notify you of the issue when you next visit our website. Secondly, when we have established that a member’s email is controlled by protection services, we are replacing direct email links to our website with indirect links via a CAPTCHA page. Since the protection services cannot pass the CAPTCHA test, it means that our website analytics will become meaningful for the first time. Lastly, we are striving to achieve 100% DMARC compliance. DMARC is a trust system for email which affects email deliverability and may affect the treatment our email receives from protection services.

False positives

We are on a steep learning curve and unfortunately we have become aware of false positives and aim to reduce them. Robotic activity is detected primarily by velocity. Simply put, robots ‘click’ more and faster than humans. However, we may have particular habits, and we’re now aware that for some this means double-clicking on web links, which doubles the amount of engagements recorded and can bring members into the clicking range of robots, resulting in false positives. However, robots cannot complete CAPTCHA and thus CAPTCHA protected assets, like forms, can only be completed by humans.

False negatives

As well as false positives meaning that actual engagement may be missed, there are also personal privacy tools that conceal interaction with email and click-throughs to our website, making the activities of members who use them invisible to us. If we believe that members are not engaging at all, then we will unsubscribe them after four months of inactivity, providing one week’s notice. This enables our mailing list to become self-cleaning, reducing both our costs and our maintenance burden. Members can resubscribe at any time, using the form to the right of every news article and others elsewhere on our website. (Note: We will not unsubscribe currently serving club or district officers with a valid and working email address).

What can you do about it?

If you have been unsubscribed robotically once, it is liable to happen again. If you use an institutional email address to receive Toastmasters email, you could ask your IT team to whitelist toastmasters.org and d91toastmasters.org.uk as trustworthy domains for email. Alternatively, you could change your email address at toastmasters.org to your personal email address. If you also reply to inform us of this change, we can ensure that this does not result in a duplicate record being created. Please also reply to our email to let us know if our email to you is misrepresented as promotional or spam and we will see what we can do to improve deliverability. The mere act of replying may resolve the issue for you.