Editor’s Note
An extra push of focused effort can be the difference between success and failure. Students study the night before the exam, athletes sprint toward the finish line and expecting parents paint the nursery (hopefully by the last trimester). In each case, a little extra effort gets the job done. Similarly, the Greater Opportunity Club of Charlotte, North Carolina, focused their efforts to complete the Success Club Plan in the final months of the 2009-2010 Toastmaster year. Being a corporate club, they made excellent use of the company’s intranet to promote the club and build membership. They ended the year with 21 members and the Select Distinguished Club Award. Their story provides an excellent example for coaches rebuilding corporate clubs and any coach who only has a few months remaining in his or her appointment.
Assessment
The Greater Opportunity Club #759264 was chartered on May 18, 2005. This outstanding club has earned many International honors such as President’s Distinguished 2005-2006, Select Distinguished 2006-2007 and 2007- 2008 and President’s Distinguished 2008- 2009. However, the club was struggling with a shortage of members because one group was not able to renew their memberships. The club, under the leadership of Vice President of Membership and former President, Phil Brehm, was able to work their way back to earn the Select Distinguished Award in 2009-2010. On May 14, 2010 the Greater Opportunity was facing the prospect of not attaining distinguished status. That is when VP Membership, Phil Brehm went into action. There was a lunch meeting to discuss the club membership challenges. Basically, this quality club had already earned four points in the DCP, and was quite a few members short of charter (20) strength.
Planning and Implementation
At the same lunch meeting, Phil came up with an action plan and wrote it on a scrap of paper. Don’t be fooled by the quality of the paper, because the quality of the ideas helped the club earn the Select Distinguished Award in a few weeks.
Here was the strategy of the Greater Opportunity Team used: Encourage members to finish leadership and educational manuals.
- Send out Outlook meeting invites to current members for the their weekly meetings on Tuesday’s at noon.
- Encourage current members to forward the Outlook meeting invitations to other associates who might benefit from Toastmaster’s speaking and leadership opportunities.
- Promptly process member- ship applications to meet the looming June 30, 2010 deadline.
- Get a lapsed member to renew his membership.
- Promote dual memberships
Results
Phil Brehm and the Greater Opportunity team went to work. On June 1st, 2010 President Faith Thaxton picked up her Competent Communicator (CC) award. VP-Education, John Crawford, followed that up with his Competent Leader (CL) on June 15th, 2010 getting the club to six goals. Now membership, was the challenge. Phil and the Greater Opportunity Club team implemented the strategy described in the action plan. By June 25th, the club had added 10 members and was now distinguished. Were these dedicated Toastmaster finished? Absolutely not. Phil Brehm then completed his Advanced Leader Bronze (ALB) award on June 29th, 2010 and the club had earned the Select Distinguished Award. The ALB was Phil’s second award of the year after having picked up his Advanced Communicator Bronze (ACB) educational award earlier in the Toastmaster’s year.
This remarkable club attained at least Select Distinguished for the fifth year in a row. They did it by picking up their educational awards and inviting visitors both electronically and personally. These invitations turned guests into members and the club’s members were determined to earn as many points as possible in the Distinguished Club Program. Congratulations to the officers and members of the Greater Opportunity club for working together to earn seven of the 10 goals to earn the Select Distinguished Award.
Lessons Learned
The Greater Opportunity club clearly shows that the leadership and speaking opportunities of Toastmaster’s will attract members if you make a concerted effort to invite interested parties both electronically as well as personally. Contributed by Mike Ryan.
A Letter of Praise
My name is Phil Brehm and I was the Vice President of Membership for a corporate Toastmasters speaking club during the 2009-2010 year. Back in early July 2009 our speaking club set our goal on achieving and becoming a TM President Distinguished Club (PDC). We outlined the path we needed follow and throughout the remainder of 2009 and into the early part of 2010 our club members did their best to accomplish their individual goals in order to fulfill the PDC requirements. However, along the way we hit some road blocks. The biggest one being that our club membership numbers were way down from what they had been a year earlier. We knew why but we just didn’t have a good plan to solicit more new members.
In early April 2010 Mike Ryan, a strong advocate and mentor of our club contacted the club President and me to ask if he could help bring up our membership numbers. At first we didn’t believe we would have a problem enrolling the 12 or so new members needed to fulfill the PDC requirement.
However, it wasn’t long before we finally realized we had a problem and probably weren’t going to fulfill the PDC requirements. Luckily, Mike Ryan had some excellent ideas from past experiences with soliciting new members. One of Mike’s excellent ideas which I believe worked extremely well for us was to send a TM meeting invite to all our current members and then have each member forward the meeting invite to any non-member associates they thought might want to improve their speaking and leadership skills and have fun doing it. Eventually, through hard dedicated work from Mike, myself and other club members we eventually were able to surpass the 20 member TM club requirement by one member. However, our club just missed achieving PDC and instead received Select Distinguished Club but it wasn’t because of the lack of club membership. Thanks, Phil Brehm