Video: How to Reorder Speakers and Evaluators

The latest update to WordPress for Toastmasters makes it easier to rearrange the order in which we want speakers and evaluators to be listed on the agenda, which might not be the same as the order in which they signed up.

For example, my home club, Club Awesome, follows a tradition of allowing a member giving their Icebreaker to go first — so they can get it over with, if they’re nervous, and relax for the rest of the meeting. Or you might want to accommodate a speaker who needs to arrive late or leave early.

Also, several clubs have requested the ability to have the agenda display which speakers are matched with which evaluators. To make that work, we want to be able to rearrange the order so we can match speakers and evaluators appropriately (for example, to have a member’s mentor be the one who evaluates their icebreaker).

The video shows how you can now drag-and-drop to reorder roles.

Previously, a meeting organizer could edit the signups for various roles, but doing that to change the speaker order was awkward if the speaker had recorded info about their speech project or title. The new reorder function copies all the project / title / intro data when a speaker is moved to a new position on the agenda.

To display the name of the speaker each evaluator will be observing, you use the “Agenda Note” field on the form. Typically, this is used to add an explanatory note such as “Leads the impromptu speaking practice” for Topics Master. In this case, if you include the code {Speaker}, it will be replaced by the name of the speaker (Speaker 1 for Evaluator 1, etc). The suggested text is “Evaluates {Speaker}”

I don’t plan to make this default functionality because if the information appears on the agenda, we want it to be correct. That means taking the time to reorder the speakers and evaluators as necessary so that it will be correct.

Of course, there will always be room for last minute changes on meeting day, but now you have one more tool for making your agenda as correct and complete as possible.