Category: Agenda Administration

The Organize screen appears in 2 places — under Agenda Template Editor on the administrator’s dashboard, where it is used to edit agenda templates, and as an option associated with each meeting that’s available to members who have been granted agenda editing rights.

In both cases, it allows you to:

• Change the timing of roles on the agenda and the number of members who can sign up for speaker, evaluator, and other roles for which you want multiple participants.
• Change the order of speakers, evaluators, and other roles with multiple participants.
• Insert and Delete Roles.
• Insert, Delete, and Edit notes that will appear on the agenda, including both standardized notes meant to appear on every agenda and “editable” notes that can vary from meeting to meeting (such as word of the day).
• Move roles and notes representing timed activities up and down on the agenda — placing them earlier or later in the sequence of activities.
• Check the total time allocated for all activities as you plan to make your meeting end on time.

Each role, note, or other content block included on an agenda or agenda template is represented on the Organize screen with options to adjust the time allowed for each timed activity and to adjust the number of members who can sign up for a role such as Speaker or Evaluator.

Click on the Up / Down arrows on the title bar of each content block to move it one position up or down. The Move dropdown list allows you to make bigger moves, for example, to move Table Topics from the beginning of the agenda to the end.

Use the Insert dropdown lists positioned between content blocks to add an additional role or agenda note.

The View options widget at the bottom left of the screen allows you to narrow how much information is displayed so you can focus on the elements you want to adjust.

Note that website administrators can control whether regular members are able to access these functions.

Use the version of the Organize screen on the front end of the website to make adjustments to the organization of a single meeting. It’s also possible to take the changes you have made for a given meeting and make that your new template.

The Agenda Template Editor on the Dashboard allows you to access the Organize screen in the context of editing the templates used as the basis for recurring events such as weekly meetings or alternate event formats such as contests. It opens on the Template Options and Settings screen where you can adjust your standard meeting schedule and the settings for who is allowed to access the agenda editing functions.

Here are all the agenda blocks, starting with the ones used most frequently.

Role

The Role block appears as a on the signup form for members to sign up or be assigned to a role. The list of roles and assignments is then displayed on the agenda. In the editor, you specify a count for each role (Example: 1 Toastmaster of the Day, 3 Speakers, 3 Evaluators) and, optionally, the time associated with that block of roles (23 minutes for 3 speakers). Time can also be associated with the Note blocks (see below).

Agenda Note

An Agenda Note appears only on the agenda (not the signup form) and can have time associated with it. These are the “stage directions” of your meeting. Example: 5-minute break, with Time Allowed set to 5.

Editable Note

An Editable Note block appears on the signup form as a placeholder for the meeting organizer to fill in details that change from week to week, such as a meeting Theme.

Signup Form Note

A Signup Form Note only appears on the signup form.

Absences

The Absences block displays an option on the signup form where members can indicate that they will be out of town or unavailable.

Hybrid

If you have a hybrid online/offline club, the hybrid block allows you to track members who are planning to attend in person.

Agenda Wrapper

Allows you to place standard content blocks such as images, headings, and paragraphs inside a wrapper that selectively displays them in a specific context. In this example, the image will be displayed on the signup form and email version of the agenda but not the printable agenda or other contexts.

Milestone

Displays the elapsed time at a given milestone such as the end of the meeting.

Website administrators are often confused about how to delete an event, given that they don’t see a delete button anywhere — that’s partly because the option is labeled “Trash.” Items placed in the trash can be restored if they were placed there accidentally, or they can be deleted permanently.

In the WordPress editor, the Move to trash button is in the sidebar on the right hand side of the screen. If no sidebar is displayed, click the gear icon in the upper right hand corner to reveal it. You also need to select the correct tab to see the properties of the document (in this case, RSVP Event), not the properties of an individual content block (paragraph, heading, image, etc.).

You might miss the Move to trash button because it appears after all the options for setting the event date and time.

When you’re editing a web page or blog post, the Move to trash button appears immediately below the author field.

Rescheduling an Event

To reschedule an existing event, change the date displayed in the calendar widget of the sidebar. You can also change the event start time and end time and specify whether the end time should be displayed. Click Update to record your changes.

Trashing Events from the Event Listing

You can also move one or more events to the trash from the listing under RSVP Events on the dashboard. The same basic technique applies to moving pages, blog posts, or other types of content to the trash. When you hover your mouse over the title of an individual event, a menu of options appears where one of the options is Trash.

Click Trash to move that event to the trash.

Alternatively, you can check off multiple items you want to delete and choose Move to trash from the drop-down list under Bulk actions. Then click the Apply button to move them to the trash as a batch.

Restore from the Trash or Empty Trash

At the top of the listing of events, you will see a categorized list of events that are published, in draft mode, or in the trash. Click “trash” to display the listing of events in the trash (again, same basic technique applies for pages and posts). From this screen, you can click the Empty Trash button to permanently delete all these posts or click the Restore or Delete permanently links to render your verdict on an individual trashed item.

If your club is hosting hybrid meetings, with a mix of online and in-person attendance, you can add the Toastmasters Hybrid block to your agendas as a way to track who is planning to attend in person. If you are limiting the number of in-person attendees (for example, because of COVID-19 social distancing concerns), this will help you track whether you’ve hit the limit.

On the front end of your site, the tracker looks like this:

It gives you the option to add or remove yourself from the in-person attendees list (by checking or unchecking the “I plan to attend in person” checkbox), and you can also record that intent on behalf of another member. Meeting planners can then see how many people are on the list.

To put this on every agenda, you would add it to your agenda template and then update the events based on the template. Click the + button to add the “Toastmasters Hybrid” block.

A placeholder will be displayed in the editor. The properties panel in the right-hand sidebar allows you to enter a limit for the number of in-person attendees that will be displayed on the website.

When this feature is active, an “I plan to attend in person” checkbox will also be displayed when members are signing up for roles, allowing them to register their intent to attend in person (or not) at the same time.

Event templates are important to how the RSVPMaker program included in WordPress for Toastmasters manages events, particularly meeting events.

Your meeting event template reflects the standard setup of a meeting: number of speakers, number of evaluators, timing for events, and so on. You create copies of the template according to your meeting schedule for the individual meeting events. At any time, you can update the event template and all the events based on the template. However, this is a 2-step process: after updating the template you will get a prompt to Create/Update events based on the latest version of the template.

As of a May 2021 update, RSVPMaker will send a reminder if it detects you have updated a template without updating the events based on the template. People often seem to forget this step, or else they don’t understand why it is necessary.

Why Isn’t This Automatic?

You might think the software would automatically update the whole series of events. That is often the result you are after when you update the template. However, there are a couple of reasons to keep it as a second step:

• Finality. The software doesn’t necessarily know when you’re done updating the template. You may have saved your work but still be adding or rearranging elements.
• Selectivity. The Create/Update routine allows you to check off which existing events you want to update. You can update just a couple while you’re testing. You can update all of them. Or you can update most of them, leaving a few unchecked. Events can be modified independently of the template, and you might not want to overwrite those changes.

The Create/Update screen shows you when an event has been modified independently of the template. Perhaps in the example shown above I’ve made room for an extra speaker at that week’s meeting and don’t want to overwrite those modifications.

The Magic Cookie Cutter

I sometimes compare templates to cookie cutters, which can be used to stamp out individual cookies (events).

Each of the cookies can still be decorated differently. Think of the role signups and speech titles as the sprinkles and frosting. The cookie retains the same basic shape, based on the cookie cutter, but can still be unique.

Occasionally, you might reshape a cookie significantly. For Halloween, you stamp out a gingerbread man but then graft on an extra head and tear off his arm. The Toastmasters meeting equivalent would be dropping a speech and adding more time for Table Topics. Now you’ve got a special cookie that no longer follows the template exactly.

One difference: this is a magic cookie cutter. Each of the individual cookies remains under its spell and can be reshaped at any time to match the new shape of the cookie cutter. The sprinkles on top stay where they are, unless the cookie has been reshaped so significantly that there is no place for them.

To bring it back to events and event templates: each event based on a template retains a link back to the template. When you update the template, you can update all of those events or just some of them. If a member has signed up for a role at a future event, they will still be signed up for that role — unless the role has been eliminated. For example, you want to be careful about changing the number of speakers from three to two if three speakers had previously signed up.

Finding the Template for an Event

If you edit an event that is based on a template, you should see a prompt at the top of the editor screen telling you to edit the template instead if your goal is to edit the whole series of events. (If you want to edit this event separately, you can do that, too.)

The option to edit a template also appears on the dropdown list of options for an event post at the top of the screen.

Or you can find all your events listed on the Event Templates screen, which is a menu item under RSVP Events on the administrator’s dashboard.

The default printable agenda layout features the club logo at the top of the page, along with the club name and meeting date. Beneath that, the agenda is divided between a sidebar on the left hand side of the page and the actual agenda listing. You can change the layout by editing an Agenda Layout document, which shows just a placeholder where the actual meeting roles will be displayed.

Here is what that looks like in the editor.

You can use the sidebar area to include some content you want to appear on every week’s agenda, such as the club mission and perhaps contact information for key officers. Or you might want to add a promotion for an upcoming district conference or district training and remove that when the date is past.

Optionally, you can include an Agenda Officers Listing block in the sidebar area. This will print the officers listing drawn from what you’ve specified on the Settings -> Toastmasters screen.

Both the logo / title and sidebar / agenda parts of the document are formatted using WordPress columns. It’s possible to change the width of the columns. To do so, click the content in the column you want to change and use the document hierarchy button at the top of the page to navigate up to select the specific column.

With the column selected, the column width property should be displayed in the editor sidebar. By default, the two main columns take up 33.33% and 66.66% of the page width, respectively, but you can change that to 30% and 70% or whatever proportions you desire.

If you don’t want to use the sidebar layout, you can delete the columns and add the Agenda Main Content block on its own line.