Capital City Toastmasters

Fellow Toastmasters,

I want to outline what I’d like to accomplish during my term as your Capital City Toastmasters President.

My overall strategic goal is for us to challenge, appreciate and inspire each member of Capital City.

My top priority is to make sure all of the rest of our officers have everything they need to complete their duties. My intention is that no member falls off our radar screen or gets forgotten. New members will know what’s available to them and what’s expected of them.

The way most clubs operate is to take a look at the goals for the Distinguished Club Program (DCP) and ask a few individuals to get educational awards based on that. While that does foster many of the activities of a healthy club (manual speeches, more members, getting dues and paperwork in on time), it leaves some folks out.

When I started as VP Education last year, I found one member that had already finished an Advanced Communicator award months before but not submitted it. She’d been told the club didn’t need it for our DCP award.

In my early years as a fledgling Toastmaster, I was never challenged or encouraged to make the most of my Toastmasters experience. No one asked me to get an award. I wasn’t given a mentor even though the manual I read said I was supposed to get one. I couldn’t fathom the purpose of club officers or how to become one. My attendance was based mostly on whether I was on the schedule or not.

What I envision for Capital City is a club where every member gets at least their Competent Communicator. When everyone is giving speeches, everyone will be getting better. When everyone is getting better, the participation, energy and enthusiasm will be fantastic. Watching folks like me go from awkward to awesome (or at least much more confident than where I started) will be a regular occurrence.

The alternative is that people join, pay their money, and then drift away. We owe it to them to make sure that we did what we could to encourage them to get what they can from the Toastmasters program. Break out those Competent Communicator and Competent Leader manuals and see how much you can learn from them. It’s often been said, “Every speech a manual speech.” Recently a new saying has been floating around: “Every member a Competent Communicator.”

To make that happen, Rey, our VP Education will be checking with everyone to see where we can cheer you on… whether in a communication or leadership award. If you’ve already been there, done that, don’t want to get anymore awards, that’s okay too. Let Rey know and we’ll do what we can to support the goals you do have as a Toastmaster.

Our immediate past president, Amy, is going to be spearheading the mentoring program. If you missed her speech last week, I’ve uploaded her handout on how to mentor to our club website. In the sidebar under “Members Only” click on Downloads. It’s listed under 5stepstobeingamentor. If you’ve been a Toastmaster very long, Amy might be tapping you for mentoring someday soon.

One thing we haven’t consistently done in the past is vote in or induct new members. Our new VP Membership, Wendy, will be helping us keep track of where our new members are in the process to ensure everyone gets all the attention they deserve to get started right.

The rest of our officers have essential roles too:

• Jenny, our VP Public Relations will represent us to the outside world when people find us online as well as maintaining our web site.
• Our new Secretary, Taline, has already begun taking great minutes at our officers meeting as well as keeping records of meeting attendance, speeches given, guests, etc.
• Jason will be handling our finances and collecting dues as Treasurer.
• And of course we couldn’t have a meeting if Lora weren’t setting up and cleaning up the room and making sure we have enough ribbons each week as Sergeant at Arms.
• Keith isn’t an officer but he’ll be writing the recaps to put on our blog. Feel free to leave comments on the blog too.

To make sure no one is forgotten, we as officers intend to make sure we touch base with anyone who misses two or more consecutive meetings to let them know we miss them and invite them back.

We’re working toward setting all these procedures up so members will have a consistently excellent experience. And that way, no new officer will have to start from scratch when he or she takes office.

I titled my speech last week, “Home of Membership Excellence” because that’s the theme of the district this year. It’s a great theme for Capital City too… membership excellence.

I think Amy said it best when she said this would be the year of the “throw down.” As your president, I urge you to set a goal to complete at least one educational goal for the year and go for it. Even if you just completed an award, you can still finish if you give one speech a month.

Overall, I’m excited about our team of officers, our club and the growth we’ll all get to experience together this term.

Your President,

Louis Burns, DTM