WordPress for Toastmasters*A very common scenario for Toastmasters meeting organizers is that you may need to adjust the number of speakers, time allowed for speeches, or both for a given meeting — for example, because a member is planning to give a 15 or 20-minute speech rather than one of the 5-7 minute speeches.
You can accomplish that, without having to restructure the whole agenda (or agenda template), through the same Edit Signups feature you use to record role assignments.
You can actually adjust the timing for any portion of the meeting this way; I’m just underlining the number of speeches and total time allowed for speeches as the most common need.
As you make changes in this mode, the time estimates change to give you an idea of whether you’re doing a good job of allocating time to each phase of your meeting appropriately to finish on time. For example, if the end time after adjustments shows up as 8:35 and your meeting is supposed to be over at 8:00, that’s a clue that you may need to tighten up your plan a little more.
Treated as a matter of “tweaking” the agenda, this function does not require the same editing rights as editing the underlying agenda or template.
Note: The tweak timing function shown here requires that your agenda documents have been updated using the “new” version of the agenda editor introduced in 2018, which in turn is based on the new WordPress editor.
Changing the Standard Timing on Your Agenda (Changing the Template)
If you are the website administrator or an officer or other member who has been granted editing rights on the website, you can make deeper changes such as reordering the roles as they will be displayed on the signup form and the printable agenda.
The animation above shows a scenario where we edit the Agenda Role block for speaker, changing the number of speakers and timing, and also insert a new agenda note, setting the time requirement for a 5-minute break to 5 minutes.
To rearrange blocks of content, including Agenda Role and Agenda Note blocks, click on the one you want to move and use the up-and-down arrows that appear to the left to move that item up or down relative to other content. To insert a block of content, click the + button that appears at the top of the page, as well as between any two existing blocks of content when you hover the mouse over the border between them.
There is a difference between editing an individual event post and editing the event template, which is a model for your individual events. I compare it to the difference between the cookie and the cookie cutter. The cookie cutter (the template) is designed to stamp out identical cookies. Cookies that start out identical can then be decorated differently. Perhaps you decide to turn some of your horse-shaped cookies into unicorns. If you decide you want them to all be unicorns, you can go back and change the template.
Because these are digital objects, we don’t have to worry about how the cookie crumbles. Once we’ve updated our template, we can not only stamp out new events based on the template but update the events we created previously to match the new template.
If you make changes to this week’s agenda, your changes will only affect this week’s agenda. They won’t automatically alter the setup for future weeks. Setting the model for future events is the job of the Event Template. Once you update the template, you can add or update the event posts for future dates. (Stamping out new cookies and reshaping existing cookies).
However, if you decide the changes you made to this week’s agenda ought to be permanent, the new Update Template Based on Event option, which appears on the black admin bar at the top of the screen, allows you to work backwards from the event to the template. Once you confirm this command, the content of the template is overwritten to match the event you have edited to perfection. From there, you can update some or all of the other events in the series — click “Check All” to select all of them, uncheck any that you don’t want to overwrite, then submit your changes.
Note that using the Tweak Timing option under edit signups does exactly the same thing as using the editor to change the Count and Time Allowed parameters for an Agenda Role block. The Tweak Timing function actually makes it easier to see how your changes affect the overall timing plan for your meeting. So one tactic might be to play with fine tuning the timing for individual meetings, then apply them to the template (and your other meeting events) once you’ve got it right.
