New Member Signups and Suggestions Tool

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).

Member Signups and Suggestions screen

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.

Starter email content

For example, in my own test of this method, here are some of the tweaks I made to the emails 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 particularly 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.