MoT #4: Program Planning & Meeting Organization

1. What is Program Planning & Meeting Organization?

Every meeting your club has creates an experience. The quality of this experience is up to not just the officers, but also the participation of all members. If your club has poor planning and organization, meetings will be fraught with stress, disorganization, and missed opportunities. Roles (especially speaking slots) won't be filled, which means members won't learn and grow. Members will find themselves put into roles at the last minute that they're not prepared for. Guests will see the disarray and weigh that in their decision to return - or not. 

In contrast, if your club has RDG Program Planning & Meeting Organization skills and habits, your members will be able to prepare well in advance for roles. You will have dramatically less last minute substitutions. Guests will see that you have a well run meeting and be more likely to join so they can learn these skills to take back to their daily lives.

The good news is these skills are not difficult to learn. Follow this lesson to learn what they are and what they can do for you.

2. Why Worry About Program Planning & Meeting Organization?

As noted in the introduction, if your planning & organization is poor, your meeting will not have the structure it needs to run smoothly. You will have to assign people last minute, which may require forcing people who are unprepared and uncomfortable with a role to take it. It may cause doubling or tripling up on roles. All of this will stress out your members, and make it appear to your guests that you don't have your act together.

In contrast, with RDG program planning & meeting organization, you do a lot more work prior to the meeting in order to make it work much more efficiently. You'll be able to better assign people to roles, especially the speaker roles (these require much more preparation time). This will also let you move your DCP champions (people that have pledged that they will accomplish an educational award) toward their goals as well. 

3. What Factors Should You Watch For?

Toastmasters International recommends the following six standards for this MoT. Commentary has been included.

• Publicize the program and agenda in advance. 
  
• This simply means to schedule the meeting ahead of time, so you don't have to stress about the meeting not being executed well. Your club should have clear expectations of how to confirm attendance or absence, how to sign up for meetings, and who is responsible for planning meetings. No one should ever be saying "I didn't know my role today was" about their role.
• Ensure all members know their responsibilities for each meeting and are prepared to carry out all assignments. 
  
• Between New Member Orientation, mentoring, and other resources, every role holder should be informed on how to do their assigned task. Supplying motivation comes from the member and from the club supporting each other.
• All speaking and leadership projects are manual projects. 
  
• This benefits the member and the club; the member by guiding them along a progression of skill-building, and the club by getting credit in the form of educational awards.
• Begin and end meetings on time. 
  
• Very important for corporate clubs especially, but also shows that everyone respects everyone else's time. Meetings that go on too long tend to rapidly lose focus, interest, and attention. Limit meetings to no more than 90 minutes, unless you have breaks.
• Feature creative Table Topics™ and exciting theme meetings. 
  
• Boring meetings don't hold attention and don't encourage people to come back.
• Base positive, helpful evaluations upon project objectives and speakers’ learning goals.
  
• Dovetails with the Toastmasters' Promise. Evaluators need to be able to deliver candid feedback in a tactful and supportive way.

4. How Do You Improve Your Meetings?

First and foremost, use the RDG Meetings course. This extensive program will guide you through every role as well as how to put meetings together. 

That said, here are some highlights from that program for making your meetings less stressful. 

• Have meeting role cheat sheets available. These are available in the meetings course resources, as well as how to make them. They will help newer members remember the important points of filling their roles. 
• Always have a sign up sheet, preferably printed out for the meeting.
• Make it clear who in your club is responsible for putting the meeting together. One method is that the VPE or education committee assigns Toastmasters ahead of time. They also collect sign ups for future meetings at the current meeting, and confirm next meeting's roles during club business. From there, the Toastmaster for the next meeting is responsible for filling the remainder of the roles and other meeting planning tasks.
• The Toastmaster should use the member site (Easy Speak is recommended) to contact and keep tabs on who plans on attending as well as what roles are and are not filled. 
• Last minute substitutions are something you will have to do now and again, but aim to minimize and eliminate them as much as possible. If a Toastmaster cannot attend, the usual expectation is that they swap their day with another member.