Macroom Toastmasters

If you are a new Vice President Education (VPE) for your club and have done any reading at all, you will know that the main duties of the VPE are:

• Putting together the program for each meeting.
• Keeping pressure on members to pursue all the available educational programs.
• Orienting and including new members in the club, assigning mentors where possible.
• Attend club meetings and area meetings.
• Preparing a successor.

You will find all the information you need on these roles in the VPE Manual. There is no need for me to repeat the information. Instead, I hope to give you the benefit of my own experience in the role with a few handy tips.

In this post, my first two tips are on Programs.

There are two parts to this task.The first is

Getting people to commit to roles.

The manual suggests assigning roles at least three weeks in advance, and re-affirming that commitment a week in advance. However it is my experience that often times people are unavailable at only 2 or 3 days notice. So my approach has been that at the end of every meeting, I ask for input to the following meeting, and then a few days before the meeting, I ring to confirm that the person is available.

Usually the phone calls will go on over a few nights, as it is rare that you will get through to everyone on the one night and if you have any drop-outs, you may need to re-ring others in order to fill the gaps.

Of course, the size of your club has an impact here, the bigger the club, the easier it should be to get people to contribute.

The second part of the program creation, is

Creation of the program itself.

Don’t be a slave to tradition. Shake it up at every meeting. Always try something new. Split the topics sections into a couple of phases between speeches, change the order of the program, be open to the inclusion of new items. For example in our own club, we allow a 5 minute Toastmaster’s time at the beginning of the meeting, where the Toastmaster for the night has a chance to play a little game – just to get the ball rolling. We have found it improves the quality of the meetings by relaxing everyone very fast.

In my next post on the VPE Role, I will be addressing the need to promote the Educational programs within Toastmasters with your members.

This post has been authored by Ant Galvin, former VPE of macroom Toastmasters, 2008/2009. The material in this post was orginally used during the Club training meeting in Clonakilty, Cork, July 10th 2009.