Manual

Wanted to share some documentation I have been working on with all of you. Our club members are not all tech savy and need step-by-step guide. Something they can look at and hold in their hands.

We are not using the Meeting Agenda right now, so sorry documentation is not there.

Most of this is from the website already, much credit to the team that put this together. This is just in a printable format with screen shots because I don't want to be the web admin for ever.

Evaluation, comments and suggestions are welcomed.

Tried to attach file but it is too big sorry. You can download from our site here

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Nicely laided out Manual Rob.

Very nice documentation.

Satish Kumar
VP PR - DPTM - Kuwait
dptm.toastmastersclubs.org

Great work (and a lot of it) -- is this a file that your club maintains over time or did you compile the whole thing recently? Really good operations manual for marketing and reference.

This is something that I compiled recently. My hope is that the next person will maintain it and so on... When I am done with a little more, I will post it as a word document for people to download and customize for their club. Any thing that could/should be improved would be appreciated.

When I accepted to be VPPR I was told I was going to get a manual. I got the standard Toastmasters International document which was helpful but, did not have detailed information for my club.

My first big job was the website because ours just wasn't doing what we needed (our FTH 1.0 site). I worked so hard on the site, I wanted people to see it. I went online to promote the club and build links (which helps site ranking). I started keeping notes (because I can't remember all this stuff) of where I put meeting announcements and club contact information. I decided to create accounts using the club emails so that future VPPR would be able to easily maintain information in the future. Instead of having to change emails and names on every account, all we have to do is select another person to be VPPR through the FTH 2.0 website (one click).

At this point, it all started to resemble a marketing plan. Basically, our marketing plan is to drive people to our website home page. Once there, we want two things to happen without a person having to scroll down the page: (1) get information about where and when we meet and (2) contact the club. We feel that these two objectives will encourage people to come and visit us.

I feel it is working as we won the Smedley Award and I am proud to say we have a lot of guests who comment on our site. Specifically, guests like to read the Meet Our Members bios and the Awards & Accolades page. I think that it is an absolute must for a club to have pictures and bios on the website because that is what people want to look at.

Next, I Googled the club name and started going through making corrections to contact information and website links. I kept notes on everything I did. Also, I developed a concise and precise statement that I use on all websites to talk about the club. It is basically the statement on our home page and I can cut-and-paste it then customize if needed. I use the contact@dunedintoastmasters.com email address whenever listing a contact email. Again by using club emails when setting up accounts, contacts can be easily managed through our FTH 2.0 program without having to change information in a hundred different places.

The Awards & Accolades page is really designed for local press to read and perhaps take stories from at their choosing. When I send press releases, I always include a link to the Awards and Accolades page where there are pictures and other information about what is going on at the club.

I hope that I will have this tied up and done by the end of February and will post a word file to share with other clubs.

Thanks
Rob

Thanks for your thorough explanation. I included reference to your manual in the presentation I made to our TLI last Saturday because it fills a great need.

As you noted, Toastmasters does a great job of providing generic training on PR, etc., but what's missing so often is the kind of operational documentation that can be passed from officer to officer. As a result, we all too often depend on "oral tradition" to get new officers up and running which often leads to too much "recreating the wheel".

Your manual template is something I look forward to using in the future (if it's ok with you, I plan to also use it for a publicity project we have planned coming up after our makeup training is completed.) Keep me posted when you make this available for our own customization. This would make a great HPL project too -- consider expanding it to incorporate all of your club's operations.