Are you getting value from the emailed agenda enhancements?

As a corporate club the best way to increase your membership is to get the company HR and executives to get behind the club, recognize Toastmasters as a learning and training opportunity and spread the word.

We already do all that, and unfortunately do still run into struggles. We're planning to invite leadership to attend our upcoming Open House and give a speech. Dates of upcoming meetings are publicized in the daily organization e-mail. We give professional development / continuing education credit for attendance.

Part of the issue is that our campus is enormous (can take 20+ minutes for people to arrive at meeting locations, and we do rotate around campus to ensure nobody in particular is disadvantaged by that) and our work is such that people can get called away on a minute's notice to work that keeps them busy for weeks or months till they can next return. Generally feedback isn't that they disliked anything; they want to keep coming but higher priority work continually floats onto their desks. We can hardly get cross with folks for performing life-saving work rather than refining their public speaking skills, and it's just very tough to compete with that.

On my end, I have worked extremely hard to make our speech evaluations more effective as learning tools for the club. A year ago we had too many "you did great!!!!!!!" style evals, and it drove me bonkers because no speech is perfect. I dove deep into research on the subject of giving feedback, started performing evaluations myself, and have rolled everything into a meeting-long interactive workshop that I'll deliver next month. Hopefully with everyone empowered and confident enough to give honest, thoughtful, and candid feedback we'll continue to improve the service we provide to members. That, at least, is my "little" endeavor to provide a quality meeting experience and convince new folks that it's worthwhile to join.

Sincerely, thank you for the info on privacy. That certainly wasn't on our minds... and not least of which because every person in our organization (aka anyone who would be a guest) already has total access to all contact information of every other person in our organization (aka established members). Thus, the privacy concept does feel a little moot, since our internal database has way more info than just the names that are conveyed on an agenda. Though, point taken about *membership in TM* being something that people should be able to choose to disclose for themselves.

Sigh. Off to refine my workshop presentation!

BarbLF wrote: As for submitting speech details via e-mail, how do you mean? That the speaker can submit their project / title / level / pathway and it will automatically populate in the agenda?

What I had envisioned is that if I am receiving an emailed copy of the agenda that indicates I am signed up as a speaker, then there would be a button (or link) next to my name that would allow me to fetch some sort of streamlined speech information form when I click the button or link. I could quickly fill out the details for my speech without ever having to log in (or an abbreviated login like for sign-ups via email) , and yes, it would update the actual agenda. There would only be a button or link next to my name as a speaker (not any of the other speakers).

So, in most cases there would be one button or link added to the email for requesting the most up to date agenda be emailed back to you, and another button for the scenario where you are signed up as a speaker.

I am the former VP Ed and find that when there are too many things to click when sending the agenda; the who do the agenda forget to click here and there and it comes out all wrong. We have to keep it as simple as possible and duplicable. Not everyone is computer savvy.

Thank you for your great work!

My clubs *LOVE* the sign up from email option... please keep!

I used a variety of combined options for nudging speakers, uncommitted members and unassigned members. These are fabulous!!

Hi, Steve,
First time here. I'm a VPPR for a club that does not use this functionality as we schedule roles 6 weeks in advance outside of FTH. I tinker with FTH anyway as I was an Area Director and witnessed one of my clubs really struggling to schedule their roles using the website. I'll check with them to see if they enabled the email response for roles option.