MoT #3: Fellowship, Variety, & Communication

3. What Factors Should You Watch For?

Toastmasters International has the following six standards when it comes to this MoT:

This is part of First Impressions, but bears repeating here. You may greet guests and get them situated, but if you don't have much support beyond that first moment, you may have a gap.

The vice president education (VPE) regularly plans enjoyable, dynamic educational programs with exciting, thought-provoking themes.

Depending on your club, this may fall to the Toastmaster to plan themes. The RDG Meetings course can help with this.

There are any number of outside the club events you can have; see the later chapter for ideas on this.

Encourage club members to participate in area, district, and international events.

This includes contests, TLIs, conferences, and more. Bring these events to the attention of your club members well before they happen - up to two months in advance.

You can have guest speakers, joint contests, as well as outside the club events. It really helps if you have people in the other clubs as well as your own.

The website will be covered in greater depth in the next course in this series, and you can use it to facilitate your news. After meeting reports also help.

When it comes to thinking about FVC factors, consider the following questions.

How do the members in your club get along? Are there at least some people with "best friends" in the club?
Are there sub-groups ("cliques") that do not interact with or push away newer members?
Are there personality conflicts that haven't been addressed and defused?
Do members support their representatives in speech contests?
Do people stick up for and do things for other members that may be going through a hard time?
Do you have get-togethers outside the regular club meetings?

Do you try new meeting formats or locations? (Sometimes even changing the layout of your tables and chairs is something to try)
Do you have people rotating through roles so you don't get the same people doing the same tasks repeatedly? (this could be a function of not getting new members trained)
Does your club try new roles or try new variations of existing ones to keep things fresh and interesting at meetings?

Do you have a reliable messaging system for officers and members to communicate? (your club may want to consider using Telegram, which is covered in another chapter)
Are members (especially officers) responsive, courteous, and helpful when answering communication?
Do people often excuse missing messages with "oh, I don't check my e-mail" or similar?
Do officers communicate upcoming events well ahead of time to allow members to be prepared for them?

Lastly, for all FVC factors: Does your club have a plan for evaluating and improving these standards, and does it carry it out?