MoT #5: Membership Strength

1. What is Membership Strength?

Research that Toastmasters International has done has indicated that, on average, around 20% of club members leave their clubs for various reasons over the course of a year. These can be factors out of your control (work, moves, etc.) and some factors in your control (meeting quality, club atmosphere, providing training).

To that end, there are two DCP goals about membership: gain four new members, then gain four more new members. If you assume charter strength (20 members), 20% comes out to four members, so meeting that first membership DCP goal is meant to keep you at charter strength, while the extra four is meant to foster growth.

While charter strength is a good baseline, your club should aspire to have around 30-35 members, with 80% or more of them in regular attendance. At around this point, you have more issues with scheduling enough speeches, and that's a good problem to have. You'll have all the people needed to run plenty of meetings, staff committees, and chair events.

2. Why Does Membership Strength Matter?

Increasing your membership strength is almost invariably why you're even reading this, so hopefully not much convincing needs to be done about why it's important to your club. Just as a quick reminder however, here's some of the reasons why our club decided back in 2009 not to be small anymore:

• Tired of doubling or tripling up on roles
• Bored of people having to do the same roles over and over
• The same people had to be officers over and over
• Sick of burnout
• Same speakers doing the same topics didn't provide variety

All of these went away as we gained members (both new and returning) and trained them.

One of the dangerous effects of declining membership is that the energy to prop up the club and keep it going diminishes with each person who leaves, which can lead to a quick downward spiral if you're not careful. The converse is also true - with more members, you get more energy and more momentum. However, even low membership clubs can effectively use what energy they have to recover, if they're willing to put in the time, energy, and imagination to pull it off, as my club proved back then.

3. What Factors Should You Watch For?

Toastmasters International recommends the following standards:

• Maintain a minimum of 20 or more members. 
  
• As noted, this should be a minimum goal. The RDG marketing program is meant to help your club reach into the 30s.
• Work to retain members. 
• This is usually a side-effect of other actions. 
• Actively promote your club in the community or within the sponsoring organization. 
• How to do this will be covered in RDG Marketing.
• Continually plan varied and exciting club meetings.
• This is covered more in MoT #4.  
• Recognize Toastmasters who sponsor new members. 
• Not enough clubs do this; usually because it's not remembered. An easy way to facilitate this is to make sure the sponsor information on new member applications gives sponsors proper credit; after sponsoring a certain amount of members, they'll get an award.
• Participate regularly in membership-building programs.
  
• Once you have a year-round marketing plan and execute on it, this will automatically be satisfied.