"Online Tools to Market Your Club & Organize Meetings" - Video and Notes from the Broward TLI, July 2018

Below are some notes to accompany a presentation to the Toastmasters Leadership Institute training in Broward County, Florida. See also How WordPress For Toastmasters Pays Off For Your Club.

You can watch the actual presentation here:

We had an overflow crowd in the room, and the presentation was well received — although a friend told me I still need a clearer “elevator pitch” explanation of the case for moving your club website to WordPress.

Here’s the central argument: as a marketing tool, WordPress benefits from input from a critical mass of web developers, including some from publications like the New Yorker and major marketing organizations. For flexibility and user engagement, it will always beat Free Toast Host, a web publishing platform used only by Toastmasters. To me, Free Toast Host is a good tool for cranking out cookie-cutter club websites, but if you want access to rich tools you can use to show the personality of your club, WordPress is the better choice.

The agenda management tools I’ve built on top of WordPress take advantage of some of the strengths of the core platform. As a student of digital business (which I have been studying since I was an editor at Internet World magazine in the 1990s), I’ve done my best to make it an engaging, productive online experience — one you can get access to for free.