Editor’s Note
In this week’s issue, Richard and Gerry use a newspaper and web-based public relations campaign to rebuild the Deltones. The members of the Public Relations Society of America described mastery of social media as one of the most important skills for public relations professionals. Social media can work for Toastmasters as well. Our clubs lack big budgets, and yet we can effectively promote our clubs using freely available technology such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, You Tube, and FreeToastHost. In a 2010 article entitled, 20+ mind- blowing social media statistics revisited, Jake Hird states that Face- book has over 350 million users, LinkedIn has over 50 million members and Twitter has over 75 million ac- counts. Some of these people may want to join your club – if they know you exist. Consider a social media strategy as part of your club’s public relations campaign. Social media worked for the Deltones. It will work for your club too.
Assessment
The Deltones Toastmaster Club was chartered in 1990. It is a community club open to all interested parties. However, it experienced low membership for many years. Three sets of club coaches tried to help the club over the last 16 years. There were eight members at the start of the coaching engagement. Some meetings only had two members. The members were in a bit of denial because they had struggled for so long. In contrast to the sparsely attended meetings, the members had a wonderful relaxed style that was worth preserving.
Planning and Implementation
Each successful coaching engagement seems to be the product of a number of smaller initiatives. We planned a web and newspaper based public relations campaign, a few changes to the agenda and a liberal application of both carrot and stick approaches with the new and existing members.
Our biggest success came from our public relations campaign. We made improvements to our website… www.deltonestoastmasters.ca We enhanced the who, why and where information with a picture, some important questions and a satellite image of our meeting location. The picture shows a member speaking comfortably at the lectern with our club banner clearly visible in the background. The questions suggest that answers to your communication needs may be found at our meetings. Here are some examples: Do you want to be a speaker people listen to? Do you want your presentations to be strong and convincing? Do you want to participate and learn in a supportive club atmosphere? The satellite image shows our meeting location (with plenty of available parking) and allows users to view a larger map so they can plan their route. To generate more communication with our current and potential members we added social media connections to our web site. Ways to follow our club included Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and email.
The newspaper public relations campaign started with an article written by Robin Spano – an author and then a member of Richmond Toastmasters who was a most willing and welcome ally in our coaching engagement. She is now a member of both clubs! We had the article published in a local paper, leveraged that article with letters of support to the editor and then leveraged it further with a front page article written by the staff of the South Delta Leader – a nearby competitor paper. The article has an inspiring picture of our members, along with some inspiring examples of self- improvement.
http://www.bclocalnews.com/richmond_southdelta/southdeltaleader/community95534389.html?mobile=true
Results
The newspaper and web-based PR campaign boosted our membership from 8 to 20 in just a few months. Our members continue their Toastmaster conversations and share their enthusiasm on Facebook. Of interest might be the fact that Gary Schmidt (the Inter- national President) is a Facebook fan. The best way to document our success is through the eyes of one of our long-time members. Peter observed that meeting attendance increased from two members, to five, then ten and now 20. We look forward to a successful new year with an Executive comprising 5
members with less than a year at the club, two long standing members and a Club Success Plan that has targeted Presidents Distinguished Status! Our focus now is to ensure the energy is sustained and that they do not need coaching for a long time to come.
Lessons Learned
If I had the opportunity to do this again, I might try to get the existing members to take on more of the workload and own the process more. We lead by example more than by dictatorship so the club members might not have learned as much from the experience as we have.
My greatest resource, without a doubt – was my co-coach. For a person who has a regular day job, is a member at another club and other commitments, it’s essential to spread the load. We also found that we had complementary skills, interests and ideas. I would like to tell other club coaches that the opportunity to coach in a local club is rare – make sure you grab that opportunity before someone else does. In fact, visit your local clubs to keep your finger on the pulse so that you can suggest that they need you as a coach rather than waiting too long.
By Richard Nash
A Letter of Praise
Fellow Toastmasters, I would like to let every one know what a tremendous success the Club Coach program was at Deltones Toastmasters. Our club membership was in danger of going down to the single digits, when long-time member and club treasurer Wendy Beauchamp put a call out for help to our Area Governor. Help arrived swiftly in the form of 2 club coaches from Richmond Toastmasters. Gerry Schenk and Richard Nash arrived at our club in October of 2009 and immediately went to work.Their philosophy was simple and effective.
1. Make sure the community was aware of the Deltones and how to get to meetings.
2. Create organized, vibrant meetings that would encourage existing members to stay involved and new visitors to join.Gerry went to work with our VP PR to improve our web presence. He reworked our web site and made sure we were the #1 hit on Google. He also set us up on Twitter and started to add speech content to You Tube. All of these efforts gave our club a larger than life feel and encouraged visitors. Richard went to work and made sure our meetings were well attended, structured and ex- citing. He augmented our ranks by opening up our meetings to his home club, Rich- mond Toastmasters. This was a move that gave the Deltones a full-house feel at every meeting and al- lowed Richmond Toastmasters to fill speaking roles that were unavailable at their home club. It was a win/win.
Gerry and Richard arranged for two area newspaper articles that got new people in the door that stayed. This all worked like a charm. We had 2-4 new visitors at each meeting. Most of whom joined our club. Our membership more than doubled. They joined because they found us through all of our marketing efforts, and once in the door they found a friendly, vibrant, organized meeting that they wanted to be a part of. Deltones was always a great club. All we needed were a couple of world class coaches.
by Jeff Ferguson