WordPress for Toastmasters*The promise of WordPress for Toastmasters is that clubs can have it all in one place: better club marketing and communications, role signups for meetings, and member performance tracking against goals like CC and CL. The marketing and communications virtues of the system are intrinsic to WordPress, a web content management system used by bloggers worldwide and by professional publications like The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly.
This post covers the Toastmasters specific process for member signups on the website, along with tracking and reporting on member accomplishments.
We start by offering a site where members can easily login and sign up for roles. Meeting organizers can also assign them to roles based on a phone call or in-person signup, and I provide a way of printing a signup sheet.
Still, the more you can get people to sign up and commit to filling roles several weeks in advance, the better. The website can be configured to send automated email reminders so they have no excuse for not fulfilling their assigned duties.
If you want your records to be accurate, you will also need a way of correcting the role signup list after the meeting (for the people who didn’t show up, despite all reminders) and adding details like who participated in Table Topics. Officers have access to a Reconcile screen on the back end of the system, which can be used to make those updates.
If you have been tracking these statistics with some other system, there is also an Edit Member Stats screen where you can record them when you are getting started. You would also use this screen to record accomplishments taking place outside of a regular meeting, such as a Competent Communicator speech a member gave at another club or a Competent Leader project such as helping to organize a membership campaign.
The payoff from this work comes in the form of reports to track progress toward Competent Communicator and Competent Leader, as well as attendance and overall activity of members.
My home club (www.clubawesome.org) has used the same basic system to organize meetings and create agendas for several years. The reporting features showcased here are newer, and I’m interested in your feedback on how to make them better.
If you would like to be set up with a free site for your club, or would like a password to the demo website, please fill out this request form.
