Building Membership - New Toastmasters Club

Once you decide to sponsor a #toastmasters club you will want to make sure it does not fail to charter. One pitfall to avoid is being stuck in a rut where you attract as many new members as are leaving. Attracting guests is not easy, getting them to join is harder and making sure they stay is even harder.   So what can you do? Three things;

Market your club and they will come.

• Make sure as many people as possible know your club meeting place and time.
• challenge each member individually to bring a guest.  When you ask one person to bring a guest, he or she will take it seriously.
• Encourage guests to mention who invited him or her and also encourage members to introduce their guests.
• Make sure you have an attractive, informative, and inviting web presence. Different members will have different electronic communication preferences. Have a footprint in each and encourage members to get active on it about Toastmasters.
• Contact speech lecturers and other speech trainers at your local colleges. They may be willing to direct students to your club.

Put on a good show and they will join.

• Run the meetings well. Stick to the agenda, fast pace the meeting and have not gaps between sections.
• Make meetings enjoyable, fun and devoid of tension.
• Let guests take roles such as hark master, joke master  and timer.
• Run on time in all sections of the meeting. Above all start on time and endeavor to end on time. Never wait for role takers to arrive. Instead replace any role taker who has not arrived five minutes to time.
• Never skip a meeting. Better have one speaker and evaluator than skip a meeting.
• Score highly on Moments Of Truth at every club meeting.

Meet their needs and they will stay.

• Make sure only manual speeches are delivered and evaluated in the meetings. 
• Let members receive positive support and recognition.
• encourage members to get involved in Toastmasters activities outside the club
• Ask the guests for comments at the end of the meeting.
• encourage members to set goals and mile stones such as purposing to achieve CC or CL in a given period year.