Back To Basics

As most of you know, I belong to a Public Speaking Club called Adirondack Toastmasters. It’s a Corporate club which means membership is only open to employees. Currently I’m the President.

We used to have a very vibrant, dynamic club a few years ago and I was very proud to be a member. But over time we lost members, and weren’t picking up new ones. Attendance suffered, and then we got down to below charter-strength.

This had me worried. I love my club, and I’ve been in it for several years. We tried new things to bring in more members, without the kind of results I’d been looking for. Then our regular members started to not show up, and that’s when I knew we were in trouble.

So what could I do to try to bring the club back to its former glory days?  I had to stretch my imagination back; and came up with a solution. Every year we have 2 membership drives, so I would plan one. We used to have special guests and food and really advertise it. Looks like I’d have to take it back to basics!

First I had to think: what local celebrity could I possibly get, for free, that people would like to see? In the past we had Brian Cody and Richie Phillips from local radio stations, and that theme worked really well. With that in mind, I sent an email to a young gentleman who goes by the moniker J Will, from Jamz 96.3: #1 in Hip Hop for the Capital Region.  Lo and behold: he agreed to come and speak to the club, for free (or at least lunch J)! I was very excited, since we’d lost several of our younger members. I was hoping that a young, successful local celebrity would be the ticket to enticing young people to visit us today.

Thanks to the rest of my board members, we were able to use our non-existent budget to print up flyers, table tents and a couple of posters with J Will’s photo. Then with the rest of our imaginary money we had a member, who is a wonderful caterer in her other “career”, make her delicious pulled pork and homemade black forest cupcakes.  My friend Andi brought in her delicious French Vanilla homemade cupcakes. Another member made the yummiest pasta salad around, 2 members brought in chicken wings; and we bought decorations and little gift boxes that we stuffed with candy and a glo-bracelets to give to the people who showed up. Well, that would hopefully show up…

And low and behold: it worked! Today the room we reserved was standing room only. The food was delicious! They enjoyed their gift boxes. And the man himself: J Will, our special guest, even brought in some giveaways from the radio station.  We gave those away to volunteers for "Table Topics".

And let me tell you: he spoke very eloquently and had the crowd eating out of his hand. He was very personable and answered all of the questions our group had for him. He was a GREAT guest speaker!  Well-educated, family-oriented: we could certainly use more young gentleman like him!

I have to say: in spite of the headaches and sweat and crankiness that went on right up until 5 minutes before we kicked off the Membership Drive meeting: it went off pretty flawlessly. I was so proud of my club; and we’ve already signed up 5 new members!

Now the only problem is: how do we top this in March????

Shout-out to J Will! Thanks for everything and don’t be a stranger J