Club Rehab

1. Club Basics Review

Sometimes, considering the fundamentals can reveal that your club has been operating on flawed assumptions without realizing it. These include:

• Meeting time - If members consistently have a hard time making the meeting time, it may be because the original time was set during the past, when making the meeting was more convenient for the members of that time, not for the members you have now. 
• Meeting day - Similar to meeting time.
• Meeting frequency - If your members aren't able to achieve their goals because there aren't enough speaking or leadership opportunities, you may need to adjust your meeting frequency. Many clubs meet on a weekly basis, while advanced clubs meet 1-2 times per month. If you're meeting less often, it can be hard to maintain enthusiasm and energy, but meeting too often can drain those as well. 
• Meeting room - Does your meeting room have the space, amenities (projector/TV, seating, climate control...), and location that works for your members? Is it clean? Easy to access? Reliable? If not, it may be time to look elsewhere.

These are some very basic items, but your club should review them to make sure they make sense for your members, prospects, and guests. 

2. Guest Process Review & Checklist

Early in my Toastmasters career, I took over for a VP of Membership that had to leave the club. I was still fairly new to Toastmasters, but I noticed that while the club had a guestbook, it wasn't being used to follow up with guests to ask them to come back. Once that was started, we started seeing many more guests come back and join.

What are you doing to get guests to come back and join? These simple checks can make big differences in your guest to member conversion rates.

• Do you have a guest kit you can hand out?
• Are guests introduced in the opening of your meeting and asked for their feedback at the end?
• Do members talk to guests before and after the meeting?
• Do members sit with guests to help answer questions?
• Are you collecting guest contact information in a guestbook or (mini-)surveys?
• Are you following up with new guests within 36 hours?
• Do you mail your guests (and ex-members) 3-4 days ahead of your meeting to remind them to come back?
• Does your club have an easy way for prospects, guests, and ex-members to contact you?

3. The General Evaluator & After Action Reports

One of the biggest missed opportunities in clubs is the General Evaluator's report. Often the GE sees their role only as introducing others, but their report can be a great source of feedback for the meeting. The GE should report on the evaluators, but also the meeting as a whole. More on the GE role is available in the RDG Meetings course.

One framework that can work for the GE report is the TEECO format:

• Timely: Was the meeting run on time? Will it (likely) end on time? 
• Educational: Were the presentations Pathways projects (or otherwise moving the club and member towards DCP goals)? Did the meeting theme get members to think and reflect? Was the word of the day good?
• Entertaining: Were the meeting theme and table topics interesting? What interesting moments happened?
• Challenging: Were the word of the day and table topics stretching the skills of the members? Were speeches making people think? Did evaluators give actionable feedback?
• Organized: Was the meeting well planned? Was there a lot of "shuffle" (last minute substitutions, doubling up) that could have been avoided? Did members confirm their attendance or absence on your member site (Easy Speak, preferably)? Did the meeting have good flow?

Having this meeting report can help all members be more successful in future, and it can also spot patterns where your club consistently succeeds or fails so they can be addressed. An after-action report can also help. This report can be done by the secretary as meeting minutes, and include the highlights of the meeting. This includes:

• How many members and guests attended
• The word of the day
• A brief synopsis of the speech topics
• The theme of the day
• The GE's commentary
• Club business highlights 

Sending this out within 48 hours of the meeting's completion to all members has helped bring back members who haven't been in attendance, so it's a good practice. If your club uses Easy Speak, storing a copy on your club's discussion forum is also good (creating a thread for the year's reports and replying to it with new ones will keep the forum clean). 

4. Club SWOT

In 2015, I took over as president for a small club. As part of our growth plan, I realized that since we would have lots of inexperienced, new members, we would need extra emphasis on teaching "how to Toastmaster" so that new people could get up to speed quickly. To that end, I implemented a set of role cheat sheets that could help get newcomers get used to roles, as well as instituting a "Ten Minute Tune Up" segment that would teach speaking, leadership, and Toastmasters skills. By focusing on training our new members, we turned them into experienced members that could take on tougher roles more quickly, and thus train the next set of new members.

A SWOT analysis is a useful tool for plotting out what your club is good at and what issues it has. 

When considering your strengths and weaknesses, consider:

• Your club's experience levels. If you have several newer Toastmasters, you may have a lot of energy, but not a lot of know-how. If you have several experienced Toastmasters, you may have the opposite. 
• Officer and committee quality (both individual and synergies).
• Meeting location, day, time, frequency, etc. (as noted earlier)
• Membership growth & turnover rates

When considering opportunities and threats, consider:

• If you have dignitaries such as district representatives or contest winners
• Do you have several clubs that meet in the area at the same time (or similar?)
• Is your local area growing? There may be an opportunity to grow along with it.
• If you're a corporate club, how is the health of the company and its support for your club? 

Using the Area Director's Report and the Wow Factor as ideas for SWOT analysis points will help you as well.

5. Ongoing Audits

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." - Will Durant

Club rehabilitation is not a "one and done" event. While you may implement new processes and correct pain points in your club, there will always be new challenges and new members. To that end, your club needs continual audits. You'll be able to build your own schedule using the month-by-month planner. Just know that a club that isn't performing these audits is letting problems go unaddressed, and potentially driving away guests and members.

6. Other Tips

Here are some other club improvement suggestions that may help.

• Get your club members to use a messaging service such as Telegram, WhatsApp, Signal, or similar. In Telegram, you can create groups and invite people to them; it's suggested that you create a group for your general club needs, and then a group for officers at minimum. You can also create groups for committees.