Author: David F. Carr

As part of my work with Founders District on a conversion of their website to WordPress, I recently created a Club Directory for Toastmasters plugin that is available to any district that would like to try it and provide feedback.

You can see a demo here. Website visitors can use the form to search for clubs by city, by schedule, or other characteristics such as whether they offer online or hybrid attendance.

District webmasters can create an initial club listing by importing a file available to Toastmasters leaders through the Find a Club Advanced feature of the toastmost.org website. I recommend following up with club leaders to check on the accuracy of the information. In the process, you can invite them to submit an additional blurb or image for an enhanced listing.

Here’s an example of a basic listing as it would appear in the directory.

And here’s an enhanced listing with a blurb about the club and a featured image. The Find a Club database is extremely limited in the information it allows clubs to share, so this is an opportunity to let them share more.

In the WordPress editor, the structured data fields that you can edit are displayed beneath the main web content editor. (If other plugins such as Yoast SEO also use that screen real estate, you may have to scroll down below that to see the club data or click the arrow button to collapse the Yoast fields).

If you start by importing a file from toastmasters.org, the software tries to identify clubs that offer online attendance or that are online-only based on the contents of the “Location” field in that file. However, I recommend prompting club leaders to check the accuracy of that and all the other information. This may serve as a reminder for club leaders to update their Find a Club information as well.

This plugin is pending approval in the WordPress plugin directory, but meanwhile you can download it here and upload it via the Upload Plugin option on the Plugins -> Add New screen. The plugin is also available on Toastmost.org for districts who host their sites there, such as 62toast.com.

Here’s a new tool created partly out of necessity, given that I’m working with the leadership of Online Presenters Toastmasters to drive up attendance and participation — and do a better job of getting members to sign up for roles a couple of weeks in advance. (We’d also love to see you as a guest at Monday’s meeting: guest registration at op.toastmost.org).

While I’m enthusiastic about automating routine tasks as much as possible, finding the right balance between automation and the personal touch is important. In contrast to the Suggest All Roles tool I introduced recently, which sends out take-a-role invitations to all members as a batch, the idea here is to give the VP of Education or other club leader the information needed for a more personal outreach.

In the example shown below, a VPE could see that I’m already signed up for a role at the next meeting, will be unavailable the following week, but could take a role for the week after that. Optionally, the list of open roles can be sorted in order of those the member hasn’t filled recently, according to agenda records.

The member’s email is displayed, along with a phone number (if provided). In addition to sending email, you should be able to paste the personalized one-click signup links into a social messaging tool like WhatsApp (caveat: because the links are personalized, you should only send them in a private message, not a group post).

If you click on the email link, you should get a starter message that already includes a default subject line and a little explanatory text. You can then copy and paste in a list of whatever roles you would like to suggest that the member take, and personalize the message as appropriate.

For example, in my own test of this method, here are some of the tweaks I made based on my relationship with the different members.

Hi, Toru, hoping to see you at Monday’s meeting or another in the coming weeks. I’m TOD for Monday and need to fill some roles.

The links on the roles included below will let you sign up with one click.

Hey, we haven’t seen you lately — any chance we can get you to Monday’s meeting or another in the coming weeks? The links on the roles included below will let you sign up with one click.

Marianne, we’re trying to do a better job of getting people signed up for roles a couple of weeks in advance. Can you help?

The links on the roles included below will let you sign up with one click.

Hey, Isabel, we haven’t seen you lately, but I think I saw that you renewed — any chance you can attend Monday night?

We’re trying to do a better job of asking people to sign up a couple of weeks in advance. The links on the roles included below will let you sign up with one click.

You get the idea: just a little something to make the message less generic. Once people are familiar with how the one-click links work, that bit of explanation can be dropped.

This is a work in progress, and I welcome your feedback on how it can be improved.

Logging Activity and Reporting Problems

BTW, the Activity Log screen under TM Administration has also been updated to provide a better record of who has signed up or been assigned to a role and who has withdrawn from a role they previously signed up for. If you experience issues with the agenda signup system, you can also consult that screen to help diagnose what’s going wrong and report it to me.

Don’t be shy about reporting glitches! I’d much rather know that something isn’t working correctly so it can be corrected than have you feeling frustrated and giving up on the software.

Following a previous introductory session, this second webinar hosted by District 62 was a more in-depth tour of WordPress administration and Toastmasters-specific options.

Part of the point of embracing WordPress is to take advantage of a modern web development platform that is widely used and continually updated. While we covered club website details specific to the Toastmost platform, many of the basics would also apply to a district website or business website.

Additional resources mentioned during the program include the documentation available at https://wp4toastmasters.com and the video course offered at https://www.wp4toastmasters.com/video-course/

To create a club website, sign up at https://toastmost.org

More technical webmasters can also install the free plugins on an independent website. However, even techies may prefer the simplicity of starting from a Toastmost template.

In addition to my resources, club webmasters may want to explore the learning materials available through https://learn.wordpress.org

Thanks to District 62 for allowing me to present a workshop on the Toastmost.org club website hosting service and the underlying software. This was a quick tour through the advantages of WordPress, how to work with the WordPress editor, and how to create and modify your agenda using my extensions for Toastmasters. I’ve been invited back to present a more advanced website and agenda administration session on October 25.

The full replay is embedded above, but you can also click any of the links below to skip to the topics I’ve highlighted.

• Examples of WordPress for Toastmasters websites and site layouts
• Creating and editing content in the WordPress editor
• Creating a site hosted at Toastmost.org
• The setup wizard (choosing initial options)
• Working with the interactive agenda
• Using the Organize tool to modify the agenda
• Q&A begins (about the last 20 minutes, covers topics like going back to see previous agendas and member role history)

I recommend that viewers also look at the video course I created, which is broken up into series of lessons on different aspects of the platform. However, the advantage of these live demo sessions is that they provide participants with the opportunity to ask questions.

Their questions, in turn, help me understand what I need to explain better — and often lead to improvements in the software itself. An example from this workshop was the woman who asked how a club that alternates between two meeting schedules should set up its agenda. See the section below.

Bonus lesson: How to modify your meeting schedule

During the Q&A for the workshop at District 62, one of the participants asked how she could set support two different meeting schedules for a club that alternates between evening and noon schedules to accommodate the schedules of different members. I suggested establishing two different meeting templates, one for the evening meetings and the other for the noon meetings.

Having come across a similar request once before, I decided I should produce a tutorial covering all the ways you can alter your meeting schedule from changing the start and end times for a single meeting, to changing the template for all your upcoming events, to handling this split schedule scenario.

In the process of producing the video tutorial, I made some changes to the way the RSVPMaker event scheduling system works to make the process easier to explain — and which ought to make it easier to accomplish!

For additional documentation, see this knowledge base article.

Toastmost users can now choose to pay on a monthly, rather than yearly basis, which means they authorize a credit card to be charged every month (but can cancel at any time). Toastmost still offers a three-month free trial period before any payment is required. New clubs might welcome the option to test the value they get from Toastmost on a month-to-month basis.

Recurring payments are also available for clubs that pay on an annual schedule. Clubs that prefer to make a one-time yearly payment instead can still do so.

Recurring subscriptions are based on an integration with the Stripe online payment service.

Your club website includes the ability to record meeting minutes as digital documents that are only viewable by club members. Several upgrades to this feature have just been added based on club requests.

• To create a blank minutes document, go to TM Minutes -> Add New.
• To create a minutes document for a regular club meeting, including details like meeting theme and who filled what role, go to TM Minutes -> Minutes from Meeting Records. This lets you import some starter content from your agenda.
• To create a minutes document based on a template, go to TM Minutes -> Minutes Templates. A template is simply an outline of the elements you expect to be included in meeting minutes. An “Executive Board Minutes Template” (loosely based on one from Toastmasters International) is created by default as a starting point.

I recently led a successful public relations campaign for my home club, Club Awesome in Coral Springs, Florida, that included website, email, social media, and traditional media components revolving around a special event meant to bring in new members.

I’m sharing the details below and am also available to answer questions.

My strategy leaned heavily on features built into the Toastmost club website hosting service based on WordPress. Technically, Club Awesome runs a separate instance of the same software — my RSVPMaker events and email marketing WordPress plugin, in combination with the Toastmasters extensions originally created for use at Club Awesome.

I can imagine running the same campaign using a some combination of Meetup, Mailchimp, social media, and a standard Free Toast Host club website, but it would have been a lot more work — and I believe it would have been less effective.

Toastmost features that made a difference:

• Blogging software, which allowed us to create a promotional article about the event, something that would be difficult to do on Free Toast Host. Our social media and email campaigns then focused on driving traffic to that blog post.
• Search and social media optimization tools, particularly for optimizing the appearance of shares of the blog post on LinkedIn and Facebook.
• Email marketing software, built into the website and specifically designed for promotions built around events and blog content.
• Guest registration, built into the website. Attendees were asked to fill out a short web form expressing interest and giving us the ability to follow up with them. Visitors to the club’s home page also saw an RSVP button asking them to register.
• After the event, we published another blog post including the video recording, plus the speaker’s slides and handouts (WordPress makes it very easy to embed video and PDFs). We promoted that via email and social media, getting another increment of value out of the event.
• In the coming weeks, we’ll start the process again with promotions for an August 25 workshop with the Geeks on Tour, husband and wife business owners who created a business out of teaching technology for travelers with an emphasis on smartphone photography.

The workshop at the heart of the campaign

Our July featured workshop speaker, Marilyn Brown was a past president of Club Awesome who used skills honed through Toastmasters to establish herself as an executive leadership coach and consultant. We asked her to speak about “The Essential Professional Value of Public Speaking,” using examples from her consulting work helping leaders improve their executive presence.

There is a new WordPress theme available on the Toastmost service, and I’m trying it out on the Online Presenters website.

Instead of displaying member options in the sidebar, this theme shows a custom menu in the upper right corner of the page with a prompt for members to sign up for roles (logging in first, if necessary). Once a member is logged in, they will see links to edit their profile and update their profile picture.

Members who have forgotten their password will also see the link to reset their password in that spot.

Member Options

View for a logged in member

Member Options

Prompt to login or reset password