President's Inaugural Message

Greetings 3Talkers!

Happy Summer and Fourth of July!

In July we start a new Toastmasters year. As your incoming president I would like to take this opportunity to talk about my goals for the club for this upcoming year.

We are a great club. We have been a Toastmasters Presidential Distinguished Club for the past 10+ years. This is quite an honor and gives us a lot of credibility as a club, so lets keep it going. In order to keep this going I think we need to...

1. FOCUS ON RECRUITING AND BUILDING MEMBERSHIP.

Right now 3Talkers is 23 members strong. To be Presidential Distinguished requires at least 20 members. So we are in a good place, but to keep it there and have it grow even stronger we need to focus on bringing people in and expanding our membership base. Building a membership base adds depth and variety to our club and helps us avoid some pitfalls such as low attendance at meetings.

Summer is a challenging time for us with attendance because people are on vacation. While I think it is important to honor our Toastmasters pledge to “attend meetings regularly” , we all know that “life happens”...jobs change, schedules change, people get sick, our priorities and commitments sometimes have to change. As these things occur our membership and attendance fluctuate and for periods can dip down very low.

One of STRENGTHS as a club is that we can always pull together a meeting. In the time that I have been with this club I have seen us pull together a meeting with as little as four people. It’s great that our members pull together and just do what needs to get done to have a great meeting and have fun with it.

Fortunately, meetings with just four people is the exception and not the norm. However, we do need our attendance at meetings to be as strong as it possible can because people need the opportunity to do speeches, the speakers need an audience and evaluators to give them feedback. As part of the leadership track, people need to take on roles. We all learn and benefit form hearing speeches and evaluations from a variety of people.

With this in mind I would like to propose the following:

“Who can I invite to the next meeting?” Let’s think more proactively about inviting people to meetings. Everytime we come, let’s think about who we can invite.

Hosting events a couple times a season, provide lunch, put out flyers and invites and have a theme to it. Perhaps a summer cookout/ baseball theme type meeting. In the fall, we could have a fall kickoff and/or Octoberfest themed meeting.

New Member Orientation - lets make sure our new members are well oriented to our website, using the roster, getting credit for speeches etc. by providing or setting up a specific time with them to go over all of these things.

2. RECOGNITION & ACHIEVMENTS

One of the exciting features of Toastmasters is the awards and recognition we receive.

Let’s revamp our award for best Table Topic with a new ribbon prize.

We currently have 10 members in the process of working toward their Competent Communicator awards. They are: Xin Ma, Fehmida Malik, Rachid Mansour, Deidre Merritt, Steve Bolton, Marie Noel, Sanjay Chaudhry, Ayako Tanaka, Karen Wuerfl and Jian Xu. We look forward to hearing more speeches from you and to honoring you as you get that first significant award in Toastmasters.

Summertime fun, vacations and experiences make great material for speeches. I look forward to hearing more speeches and seeing you at our next meeting on July 12, 2010

If you have comments, questions or suggestions, please bring them to my attention at a meeting or email me at p2mazzola@charter.net.