Category: News

The personal touch is great, and to the extent that someone from your club can be calling people during the days leading up to a meeting, it’s likely to pay off in a better turnout. But I’ve found a little automation also can help.

At my home club, Club Awesome, we send out an automated reminder two days before our regularly scheduled meeting, and that seems to work well. Here, the reminder interval is customizable to 4 hours, 8 hours, 1 day, 2 days, or 3 days in advance of your scheduled meeting. The trick is to remind people far enough ahead that they see your note and not so far ahead that they forget what you reminded them about.

The Toastmaster of the Day gets a reminder that he or she is supposed to be in charge of organizing the meeting and filling any empty roles. The message includes the current signups list and a member listing with everyone’s contact information.
Continue reading “Email Reminders Help Keep Members Showing Up”

Here’s a tour of WordPress for Toastmasters, including an overview of why it works the way it does.

The second version, below, is a shorter excerpt focused on the demo portion of the presentation.

Shows how to interact with the website in different roles:

• Member signing up for roles online
• Meeting organizer signing up others, emailing members to ask them to fill open roles
• Officer editing / updating member stats, reconciling records of past meetings
• Officer or member viewing performance reports
• Officer or club webmaster posting to the blog, cross promoting posts on social media

Here are the current themes available on the WordPress for Toastmasters site, including the one with 6 alternate logo/heading banners. Someone told me the burgundy color scheme should only be used at the district and above level, so trying to get a ruling on that.

Update: I currently recommend downloading the Lectern theme as the best option for Toastmasters branding on WordPress. Like the example shown below, Lectern allows you to choose from among several logo banner choices. Lectern is the standard theme on the free sites offered here. To install it on any other club or district website, download it from the wordpress.org repository.

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I just got this working and had to share. The “My Toast Home in Twenty Twelve” theme I just made available on the website allows you to pick from one of 6 different Toastmasters-branded banners.

This is a handy customization option in addition to those I described in my previous post on Changing the Design of Your WordPress for Toastmasters Site. For a logged in site administrator, the Toastmasters Banner option appears on the drop down menu shown below as well as on the administrator’s dashboard under Appearance.

From the Toastmasters banner screen, you can choose any one of 6 Toastmasters banners designs (originally created by Bradley Smith for the My Toast Home theme and used by permission).

You can then take advantage of some of the other WordPress design customization options, such as modifying the background color used on the site to match the banner.

I still plan to offer the My Toast Home themes independently but am currently working with designer Bradley Smith on a few small changes. You may find his themes to be a more complete package. But my mashup of his headers with one of the standard WordPress themes distributed with the software (Twenty Twelve) offers a nice degree of flexibility.

Your site will be most impressive if it contains good content about your club and its people, but design is also important. In WordPress, you can change the whole look of your site by changing the theme. A WordPress a theme is a set of templates, images, and fonts, and other styles. WordPress for Toastmasters makes a set of Toastmasters-branded themes available for your use, and we will be adding to it over time. Most of these are actually “child themes,” meaning modifications of popular WordPress themes.

I’ve just updated several of these to be closer to the Toastmasters International branding guidelines.

When you’re logged in, Themes is one of the options available from the black menu at the top of the screen. From the administrator’s dashboard, you would go to Appearance -> Themes.

The Themes selection screen allows you to choose any of the available themes and click Activate.

Many themes also offer customization options such as the ability for you to change the background color. For example, the design you see below is a combination of the Twenty Twelve Maroon theme and customization of the background for a dark burgundy color. The numeric code for that color is #511, but you can also pick a color using the pop-up dialog box.
Continue reading “Changing the Design of Your WordPress for Toastmasters Site”

Does your Toastmasters club need a website upgrade? Are members having difficulty logging in to sign up for roles? Have you been complaining for months about the same website glitches? Are officers frustrated with the limitations of your toastmastersclubs.org site for marketing or social media promotion?

The WordPress for Toastmasters project is based on the world’s most popular blogging software, which is constantly upgraded and enhanced. But unlike a free account on WordPress.com, this version is customized with features specific to the needs of Toastmasters clubs — meeting role signups, a member directory, customizable agendas, and email reminders.

After running a great meeting or a successful contest, you can post photos or video of the best speeches to your site and cross-promote them on social media.

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How to get it

I’m working on a self-service signup option, but for now you need to contact me with your club name and number. I’ll send you back a password to a move-in ready website at an address such  as myclub.wp4toastmasters.com. You will have several options for a site theme (a set of templates with different colors, backgrounds, and fonts). If you prefer a different one from the WordPress directory, I can help you customize it to include Toastmasters branding.
Continue reading “Free Toastmasters Club Website Upgrade”

kludge (noun) an ill-assorted collection of parts assembled to fulfill a particular purpose.

I know I am not the only one who thinks there ought to be a better way to manage a Toastmasters club online, meaning not only the routine meeting agenda but special events and marketing and recruiting campaigns. FreeToastHost, which I’m implicitly criticizing by creating an alternative, offers a system for managing meeting signups, but it’s not so great for general marketing purposes.

Lots of Toastmasters clubs and districts have resorted to kludges like these:

• Use FreeToastHost as the site for a club administration, while using a WordPress site in parallel as the club blog.
• Use WordPress or another web content management system to power the main club website, Supplement it with a Google Drive spreadsheet or some other free cloud software product used for meeting signups.
• Our district uses a FreeToastHost-based website in combination with separate events website, plus a cloud-based event registration service. To his credit, the district webmaster is working hard to assemble these pieces into a coherent whole.

Continue reading “Toastmasters club marketing and meeting management on one site: no kludges”

The WordPress for Toastmasters solution makes it easy to import a list of members, using the spreadsheet club officers can download from Toastmasters.org. You copy and paste from the spreadsheet into the field labeled Spreadsheet on the web form and submit the form. If this is your first time importing members, or if there are new members on the spreadsheet since last time, new user accounts will be created for those members.

The video below shows what that looks like, starting with the spreadsheet import and continuing through the customization of a user profile (change profile, add a photo).

Notes: To paste into a web form, you will need to put your cursor in the right field of the form, then click a control key combination (Ctrl + V on Windows, Apple Command key + V on Macs).

After the form is submitted, the website displays the message that will be sent to the new users via email welcoming them to the club’s website and asking them to update their profile.
Continue reading “Toastmasters Member Import/Sync Routine”

The WordPress for Toastmasters Project combines all that is good about WordPress with some added features specific to organizing Toastmasters clubs and meetings. But what’s so great about WordPress? Its wonderfulness seems so obvious to me that I sometimes forget to explain that part.

So, to backtrack, let me start by quoting from the current (as of this posting) home page at WordPress.org: