The sprint to Distinguished District: Is this normal?

With just a few weeks to go in the Toastmasters year, clubs are busily signing up new members and registering their last few awards, making sure they achieve everything they set out to achieve in their club success plan. For many clubs, that means being distinguished (or select distinguished or president's distinguished). While there are many measures of success for a club, hitting the ten goals of the Distinguished Club Program is one indication that your club is healthy and serving its members well.

The administrative groups that support the clubs - Areas, Divisions and Districts - have their own Distinguished Programs to work towards. For example, an Area (a grouping of four to six clubs) is distinguished when at least half of its clubs are distinguished.

For the District as a whole - that's all of New Zealand - being distinguished requires a mixture of club growth, membership growth, and existing clubs being distinguished. This year, District 72 will be distinguished if we have 9 new clubs, around 170 new members, and at least 109 distinguished clubs by the 1st of July.

So how are we doing? You can see our current progress on the Toastmasters International dashboards. And what's this? We still have fewer clubs, and fewer members, than we had at the start of the year - both of those growth figures are negative at the moment.

District 72's progress as at 10 June 2016

At first glance it looks as if we have little chance of being distinguished this year, with our growth figures so low. But never fear! As it turns out, the numbers we're showing at the moment are very normal. In fact, this time last year we were in almost the same position - and yet we ended up as a distinguished district.

The chart below shows District 72's club growth figures for the final three months of 2014 and 2015, compared with this year. All three years show around 5% club loss after the April renewals, and yet in each of the previous two years, club growth reached at least 2% by mid-July. Our 1% club loss today is almost exactly the same as it was at the same time last year and the year before. In both years, club growth lifted in the last few weeks of June as new club sponsors worked to get their paperwork in before the end of the year. Keep an eye on the dashboards - chances are, the same thing will happen this year.

What about membership growth? It turns out that's looking pretty normal too. In each of the past three years we've experienced membership loss of between 8% and 10% after April renewals, but then membership has grown steadily and ended up well above our starting point. This year is no different - clubs are signing up new members at about their normal rate, and the District is likely to end the year much bigger than it started.

So will District 72 be distinguished this year? Wait and see! There are plenty of clubs in formation that have been working steadily all year with the aim of chartering in June. As they finish off their last administrative arrangements and turn in their paperwork, both club growth and membership growth will lift. And what that means is more fellow Toastmasters - more people building their skills in communication and leadership, and more friends to meet when we visit other clubs or attend conferences. Distinguished is the goal, but sharing the benefits of Toastmasters is the real reward. Good luck to everyone who is working right now to achieve it.

Summer training available for club officers

Happy new year to all! Although the sun is still hot, many of us are getting back into work mode and starting to make plans for the year ahead.

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Within your club, a great way to start off the new year is by attending club leader training (CLT). This training is an opportunity for you to reflect on how your Toastmasters year is going so far and to plan for the second half of the year. Sessions are open to all club officers and anyone who is interested in being an officer in the future.

In December, more than 70 club officers from around Wellington attended early pre-Christmas training sessions. Here are some of the new things they said they're going to try as a result of their time at training.

• Start organising a nominating committee
• Update guest packs
• Use Spirit of Success awards
• Survey members
• Succession plan
• Social activities
• Get feedback from guests
• Instigate reserve speaker
• Organise a Moments of Truth session
• Track CL progress
• Set up Facebook page

Do you know what all of these mean? Come to CLT to learn more about them! Since December is a busy time, the same training is being offered again in January and February to make sure everyone has a chance to attend. Your training opportunities are:

Division J sessions (email Gregory for more information)

• Saturday 30 January, 9.30am-1pm, Petone Baptist Church
• Sunday 31 January, 1-4pm, Lands Trust Masterton Education Centre (click for map)
• Saturday 27 February, time TBA, Linden Community Centre

Division E sessions (email Gael for more information)

• Tuesday 16 February, 5.30-9pm, Wellington Girls' College library (click for map)
• Saturday 20 February, 9.30am-1pm, Wellington Girls' College library
• Lunchtime CLT (must attend all three sessions to receive credit): Monday 15, 22 and 29 February, 12.15-1.15pm, St Andrew's on The Terrace

If you're a club officer, attending training will help your club to achieve recognition in the Distinguished Club Program. Each club needs at least four officers to attend training twice a year for recognition. If you want to see how your club is doing, check out the Toastmasters International dashboards (you can navigate to your Division, Area and club in the main body of the page, or enter your club number in the search box at top left to go straight to it).

See you at CLT soon!

Club officers: time to refresh your knowledge!

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December is a time for celebration. Time to recognise the successes of the old year - and time to prepare for a new one.

In Toastmasters, December is halfway through the year and a great time to take stock. How is your club doing? Are you making progress on your goals? How's your membership level? What new things could you try come January?

For club officers, the December-February period brings an opportunity to refresh your knowledge. When you first took office in July, you attended club leader training and learned about your role, leadership, and the wider world of Toastmasters. Now that you've had some time to apply that knowledge in your clubs, we invite you to come together again and debrief. What's going well? What needs tweaking? What are other clubs doing that you might try?

Attending club leader training this round will complete your club's training requirements for the year. By getting at least four officers trained in July and at least four in December-February, your club receives recognition under the Distinguished Club Program, Toastmasters International's standard for a successful club.

To make it extra easy for your club officers to get trained this round, we're offering two sessions of club leader training before Christmas (more will be offered in the new year). They are:

Thursday December 10, 5.30-9pm

Upper Chamber, Toi Poneke

61 Abel Smith Street
Parking available on Abel Smith Street (metered till 6pm).

Saturday December 12, 9.30-1pm

Wellington Girl's College library
8 Murphy Street
Some parking is available along the driveway off Murphy Street - the library itself is at the end of the driveway.

As well as club officers, please invite anyone who is thinking about becoming a club officer in the future. This session will give them a chance to learn more about the roles and what it means to serve as an officer and help a club achieve success.

See you at a club leader training soon!

What really makes a successful club?

What is success? In Toastmasters, success is clearly defined for us: successful clubs are Distinguished in the Distinguished Club Program (DCP). That means they achieve at least five goals (PDF) and also have at least 20 members by the end of the Toastmasters year.

But how do clubs become successful?

In the Toastmasters International Members Group on Facebook (which is an excellent discussion forum that I highly recommend to new and experienced Toastmasters alike), conversation is often focused on how clubs can build membership and achieve goals. Recently the District Statistician from District 57, George Marshall, posted some very interesting figures linking club success to meeting frequency and to meeting duration.

Being an economist, I couldn't resist working with those figures to produce a few simple charts.

Chart showing membership and DCP goals for the 2014-15 Toastmasters year for 15,080 clubs, categorised according to the number of days between their meetings.

Chart showing membership and DCP goals for the 2014-15 Toastmasters year for 3,882 clubs, categorised according to the number of minutes of club meeting time per month.

It looks as if a club that meets more frequently has more members and achieves more goals. Similarly, clubs devoting more time to meetings each month are more successful than clubs with less meeting time. But what does that mean?

A club with more meetings provides more speaking opportunities, meaning it can support more members and achieve more goals. And a club spending more time in meetings can get more speeches in. The argument goes the other way, too: a large club with lots of members needs to meet often and for a reasonable length of time in order to provide all those members with the opportunities they need to meet their goals. Otherwise the members could become disillusioned and leave the club, taking their educational awards with them.

Supporting members and achieving DCP goals takes time. After all, it takes 100 minutes to achieve a Competent Communicator award (7 minutes of speech plus 3 minutes of evaluation, for 10 speeches). That means it takes 400 minutes of meeting time to achieve the first two goals on the distinguished club program. To fit that in, the club has to spend a reasonable amount of time in meetings. For advanced communication awards and leadership awards, the time requirement could be even more!

So is it as simple as increasing your meeting frequency to weekly from fortnightly to get extra goals on the DCP this year? Probably not. If the members of your club are accustomed to achieving at a certain rate - say, one speech every six weeks - they'd probably prefer to continue at that rate even if there are more meetings. But that's only if they are happy with the meeting time as it stands! What if they'd be just as happy meeting more often, or for longer? Why not ask them? There could be untapped potential there for your club, which you could unlock just by having slightly more meeting time each month.

Success in Toastmasters is narrowly defined as achieving DCP goals and membership strength. But where do those things come from? They come from having active, engaged members who are happy achieving their goals. Happy members recruit more members, give speeches, achieve goals, and make your club Distinguished.

There's no magic formula - supporting your members means meeting as often and for as long as works for them. If they're achieving their goals, your club will achieve its goals. Are your members happy with their current rate of achievement? Ask them!