My Santa Cruz Toastmaster club, like many other Toastmaster clubs, has discovered that we aren't receiving as many requests for guests to visit our club since COVID has restricted our ability to meet in person. This has propelled us to consider new approaches to grow membership.
This past month, my home club hosted an Open House in the hopes of attracting some new members. At the end of one of our club meetings, a week before the Open House, I asked our members to complete an exercise with me. I asked them to write down:
This past month, my home club hosted an Open House in the hopes of attracting some new members. At the end of one of our club meetings, a week before the Open House, I asked our members to complete an exercise with me. I asked them to write down:
- 3 reasons they joined Toastmasters
- 3 things they'd gained from Toastmasters
- 3 people they know who would benefit from Toastmasters that they'd enjoy having in our club.
I then asked them to make a commitment to communicate 3 times with these 3 people that they'd written down in these 3 different ways in this order:
- Email them
- Text message them on their Mobile Phone
- Call them on the phone
The idea for this exercise came to me after attending Mary Czarnecki's Marketing Accelerator. I began to ponder how to leverage the tools she'd given our cohorts to engage customers to grow Toastmaster club membership. Mary gamified the task of attracting potential customers among the cohorts in her program. Each of us was to track how many times we communicated with potential customers via social media, over the phone, by email or through any other channel we might be using for communication and compare our results with each other as a means to motivate us.
I've come to realize that the digital marketing that I've been doing for our club as VP of Public Relations wasn't nearly as effective as having a friend or college invite another to the club.
My first year as VP of Public Relations for my club, I attained permission to the club website and Facebook page. I learned how to post events to our districts Meetup when we had Open Houses. I found that for the most part, our club members didn't want to engage over Facebook. People didn't come to our Open Houses when we advertised them on the Meetup.
We'd begun to rely on the people who would find us by searching on the Toastmaster.org website. Our club was conveniently located in downtown Santa Cruz at a popular cowering location and our evening meeting time was convenient for individuals who attended after work.
The lack luster results of Facebook to attract new members to our club made it clear to me that growing a Toastmasters club requires a different approach than what is often applied to growing an online or brick and mortar business. As VP of Public Relations for several terms, I've completed the officer training for the role more than a few times. Most of the emphasis has been on digital marketing.
It is also true that although a Toastmaster club is a nonprofit, the needs of clubs is quite different than most nonprofits. The goals of most nonprofits are to raise funds to support programs, whereas a Toastmaster club focuses on growing membership to 1-2 dozen people on average.
Nonprofits and businesses typically desire to attract larger numbers of individuals. Toastmasters members interact regularly with each other. Nonprofit supporters and customers of businesses do not typically develop long term relationships with their organizations the way that members of a club do.
