Club officers in Toastmasters International (VPPR and VPM) should use all the brains they can borrow

They can learn from articles published in the Toastmaster magazine. Also they can learn from what other Districts have been doing – via the Golden Knowledge Base. For the Division A Toastmasters Leadership Institute on June 29, 2019 I prepared a handout about Toastmaster magazine articles and Districts for the training sessions on both Vice President of Public Relations (VPPR) and Vice President of Membership (VPM).

Toastmaster magazine has a web archive of issues from 2012 to 2019 (and a separate Gallery for even older ones). For each issue there are links to individual articles in the web version (back to June 2016), and for a .pdf file of that issue. Here are dates, page numbers, titles, and links for some relevant articles.

Articles about Membership and Marketing

2019 05 P14 Build the club you want Link

2018 03 P16 Membership Retention: is your bucket leaking? Link

2017 07 P16 Stir Up Excitement with an Open House or Demo Meeting Link

2017 04 P17 How to resuscitate a struggling club Link

2016 10 P20 A roadmap for club growth Link

2015 09 P2 What do prospective club members want to know?

2015 08 P12 A ‘top notch turnaround

2012 01 P20 Building club membership

Articles about Public Relations

2019 04 P16 In public relations, persistence pays Link

2019 01 P7 Quick Tips: create a quality video Link

2018 11 P7 Did you know? Get the word out with good pr Link

2018 02 16 Spread the word: grow your club Link

2017 04 P14 When bad things happen to good clubs Link

2015 08 P14 Social media tips for your club

2015 08 P16 The power behind proper branding

2015 08 Putting the ‘PR’ in professional

2013 10 P12 Getting the message out

2011 01 P28 Stand out with video

Lark Doley is the 2018-29 president of Toastmasters International. She has a personal web site

containing the Golden Knowledge Base described as follows:

“Toastmasters Districts around the world have some AMAZING documents on their websites that can be used as resources to start, build, and strengthen clubs and their members. The Knowledge Base pages on this website have collected hundreds of these documents in one place sorted by category for you to use.”

The Base has pages there about Club Building, Club Coach, Club Meetings, Club Officers, Conference, District Officers, Education, Fliers, Membership Building, Membership Retention, Mentoring, Public Relations, Speech Contests, and Youth Programs.

I found a few mistakes there so far. In her page on Membership Building there is a line titled D28_Hundreds of Membership Building Ideas_ with an incorrect link instead to a pptx file on Executive Leadership Panels. I looked around and found the correct link to a wonderful eight-page .pdf file with 236 ideas. In her page on Fliers there are links to D49_purple-pill dot doc and D72_Pill vsn 1_Dale Hartle. But pills are forbidden - page 44 of the Toastmasters Brand Manual says:

“Images that should never be used alongside the Toastmasters brand:

Animals, landscape, children, food and appliances (this includes toast and toasters), MEDICINE (my capitalization), cartoons, architecture, other images or designs.”

I blogged about the Woodrow Wilson quotation back in June 2017. The image of a brain was adapted from one by TilmannR at Wikimedia Commons.