The Online Audit - District, Other Sites, & Conclusion

1. District Website Audit

If your club belongs to a district, they almost certainly have a website. If you're not sure what the site is, you can do a Google search for "Toastmasters District" with your district number included. If you don't know your district number, you can login to Club Central, then select Distinguished Performance Report. Your region and district will appear on this report (as well as your DCP progress).

You can then use this page from TI to access your district's site. Be sure to bookmark your district's site, as it usually has information about training, contests, and promotions you'll want to know about.

Because every district's site is different, what you need to audit there varies. Mostly what you want to do is to verify that any mention of your club (such as club listings, area alignments, and so on) is accurate. It's likely that if any changes need to be made, you'll (usually) need to contact your district's webmaster. 

2. Other Sites Audit

If your club has other sites or online platforms, you'll want to make sure they're up to date and accurate. This can include various social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.

2.1. Social Media Sites

Many clubs are advised to have a social media presence in order to promote themselves, but the advice doesn't go into who will maintain it, what to post, and what your strategy with it should be. Later courses will address some of the latter items here, but for the purposes of the online audit, you should first build a list (a bookmarks folder works fine) of platforms your club is involved with, who has access to administer them, then review each in turn.

If your club has a Facebook presence, you should check it for accuracy (especially the when and where of your meeting), as well as how up-to-date it is. If you have public-facing content, updating it after meetings (at the most, once a month) needs to be handled by someone, likely on the PR committee. You'll also need a strategy for continuing to update it after new officers are elected.

Another consideration you should have is "who is going to maintain the Facebook presence?" If no one is going to take pictures and post updates regularly, it can give the impression that the club is dead, and you may be better off deleting it.

The RDG Marketing plan strongly advises you to have a Meetup group because it's a powerful way to find people in your area interested in personal development. However, if your meeting locations, times, or days are wrong, or no one is answering questions and greeting new members in the group, you need to either assign someone to fix it (they will need the correct access rights) or consider canceling your subscription. Again, non-engagement can be seen as a sign the club isn't active.

Much of the same applies to Twitter and YouTube. The former needs more frequent updates and maintenance to gain followers and post content, the latter somewhat less so. 

In short, you're going to want to audit the following for any social media site:

• What platforms are we using?
• Who has the rights to make changes to the group?
• Who has the rights to post content?
• Who is updating the site/creating content and communicating with prospects?
• How often is this being done, and is it enough?
• How will hand offs from old to new officers be handled?

2.2. Meetup Review

Meetup is a great tool for marketing, and getting it setup will be focused on in the RDG Marketing course. If your club currently uses Meetup, consider the following:

• Are meetings listed at the correct time, day, and location?
• Do you have the correct tags and description set on your Meetup so that interested people can find your group? (use tags like "self-improvement", "leadership", "public speaking", "self-development" and so on)
• Are names and descriptions for your Meetups different and interesting? (for example, if you're in a club that meets weekly, do you have something at least slightly different for your first week's meeting versus your second, third, etc?)
• Who is getting mail about people joining your Meetup group? Are they sending something to them inviting them to join one of your meetings?
• Are club members in your Meetup group? If so, are they confirming their attendance on Meetup so it looks like you have an active group that people want to be a part of? (You may want to include a link to your Meetup in your meeting reminder mail to make this easier)
• Is someone quick to make changes if there is a meeting modification or cancellation?
• Does your Meetup site guide people to your marketing site for more information, and does the link work?

2.3. Other Websites

If your club uses any other websites, the concepts for auditing them is much the same as the other sites that have been covered here. You want to find out:

• Where are these sites? (get the URLs)
• Who is hosting them? (and what is the club paying, if anything?)
• Who has administrator access to these sites?
• Who has access to these sites? (read, write, or otherwise)
• What content is on these sites?
• Is this content up-to-date and accurate? 
• If not, who can fix it? 
• By when will they fix it?
• What is the purpose of the sites?
• If no one is managing these sites, does the club want to remedy that, or take them down?
• If the club wants to keep the site going, who will update it, and on what schedule?

For example, Superstar Speakers has a site based on Wordpress run on one of its member's servers for officer collaboration. The site URL is identified as http://superstar.hostedsites.cc, and the owner is Peter Parker. Peter has admin access to the site, but Danny Rand, the current secretary, has elevated access to post files and moderate other posts. The other officers have access to reply to posts. The site is dedicated to the officers of the club, and it's been agreed that users are to be changed when the officer rotation changes, which Peter helps facilitate. Content is up to date because Danny posts executive meeting minutes to the site. The officers find it a good resource, so they decide to keep it going, though do decide that the site shouldn't be indexed by search engines to prevent confusion by prospects and guests looking for their club, so they turn off that option within Wordpress.

3. Finishing the Online Audit

If you've gone through the process of the Online Audit, you should now have a much improved online presence. In later courses, improving your online presence will be covered so you can attract more prospects and turn them into guests, as well as persuade new members into becoming recurring members.

If the process feels overwhelming, don't stress out. Simply go over one site per week, doing a small piece per day. The other alternative is to delegate the work out to committees, though if they don't have access, this may be more difficult. If you don't have one of these sites right now, don't worry; getting those setup will be covered later as well. The two site model will be covered too.