Have a look at toastmastersd17.org

By 10.15 am I should have the first blog story on the site. Please add your comment.

Can you please help me, recently lost my phone and lost the contact for James Park who I believe may have had an association
With WA toastmasters.

Could you please supply myself or James with contacts so I may re contact him. My number is 0425 728996.

Your assistance will be very appreciated,
Kindly
Wendy Lakeman

Any toastmaster in good standing who meets the requirements or 6 consecutive months as a member of a district council may stand and I know this person meets this.

Please can I get an explanation of this?

This is a little like an ALF player who also has the expectation he will play in the WAFL and turn out for some reserves games as well. Surely anyone coaching that player would suggest their ability and commitment be applied to the most important games.

Becoming a District is a huge accomplishment; when everyone goes home from the Convention we will still be left with the current nimbler of clubs and members.

All the more reason for the efforts of these 15-20% of Toastmasters to be more focussed and for the attention of the new District to be placed on recruiting new people who have never had any of the benefits of Toastmasters in the first place.

…in our drive to become a District.

I also agree that these 15-20% of Toastmasters have the most significant commitment to our organization. Doesn’t it follow their Toastmasters careers

It’s good to have some real numbers here at last. And while this is a better result (as a percentage of real people) than I thought, your own figures show between 1 in every 7 and 1 in every 5 memberships are duplicates. Nor do I necessarily agree this is the reason for our success.

I do agree joining new clubs is a formative experience and I’ll accept that Western Founders and WA Governors are very important clubs in our drove to become a District.

We have discussed this situation in a slightly different form before, but always with estimates, not actual figures. Well, here are some.

On July 20, 2010, the first month of the current Toastmaster year, TI had 993 Toastmasters registered in WA. I have the directory – in an Excel file. I think July is a reasonable snapshot of the WA year. I sorted the file by member number and then counted the extra memberships after the first one for each member with more than one membership. We had 851 primary (actual) members and 142 extra memberships from members with more than one club. That is very different from your estimate of 500 to 600 actual Toastmasters.

32 had 2 club memberships, 13 had 3, 11 had 4, 4 had 5, 3 had 7, 1 had 8 and yes, one had 14! I was one of the 7s (but 6 now). I am not going to name those with 4 or more memberships, but to me they are very much the key leaders who have driven our very successful growth in numbers of clubs and membership. In my experience those key leaders have almost all extended their Toastmaster experience by Joining and learning from other clubs with other styles. There have been two very important clubs in this regard – Western Founders and WA Governors. They have been training centres for Area Governors, Division Governors and other leaders.

So, Andrew, we disagree on this one. I think that the approximate 15-20% of our membership who are dual members are the key reason for our success. I think and I hope that this will continue.

I’m sure you are right about recovering to 900-950 memberships by the end of June. This means an average paper club membership of about 16-17 (1000 divided by 60 clubs – which actually compares very well with Australian TM stats. On the other hand, this analysis masks a much more relevant issue: the incredible number of multiple members of Toastmasters clubs in WA.

These 950 members only represent how many memberships that have been paid; the real question is how many PEOPLE are WA Toastmasters. I suspect when this analysis is performed, we do not have more than 500-600 actual Toastmasters.

As far as I’m concerned to be a full member of a club means attending 15-20 meetings a year, plus most likely be a member of the club executive. Throw in some contests and other special events – the number of annual attendances is closer to 30, all up. Then a second club represents another 30. And we have a significant number of members who belong to yet a third club. All I’m saying is all this may add up to 100 nights a year out of your life. That’s a lot of commitment..and a lot of duplication and triplification of effort!

I have been a Toastmaster since 1978 and I am personally convinced the road to longevity, like everything else in life, is a healthy balance of Toastmasters and life commitment. I think an individual Toastmaster is much more likely to personally prosper through an appropriate amount of effort, not an attempt to cram as much Toastmastering into a finite period as possible.

And now that we are a District, perhaps we ought to stop double and triple counting and concentrate on growing our membership with additional human beings who are attracted to our offering.