Founder of Online Presenters and of the WordPress for Toastmasters project. Past President and member of Club Awesome in Coral Springs, Florida. Also former Area Governor, District Social Media Director. Outside of Toastmasters: writer, editor, and digital marketing consultant. He currently works as a Senior Insights Manager for Similarweb, the digital intelligence platform. Formerly an editor at publications including InformationWeek, Baseline Magazine, Internet World, and WebWeek, and a contributor to VentureBeat and The Enterprisers Project.
Wednesday October 25, 2023 7:00 PM EDT to 8:00 PM EDT
District 62 has partnered with Toastmost.org, a club website service based on the popular WordPress software, to help clubs modernize and make more effective use of their club websites. The district’s own website is also hosted on Toastmost.
This is the second of two workshops (see the replay of the September 20 introductory session) and will go into more detail on how to administer one of these websites and get the most out of it as a marketing and productivity tool for your club.
Topics to be covered include:
Settings for the RSVPMaker and the RSVPMaker for Toastmasters plugins
Tour of the TM Administration menu
Email lists and email forwarders
Optional plugins for additional features
Using the Yoast plugin to optimize content for search and social media
This blog post is by David F. Carr, who provides technical support for our district website and runs the Toastmost.org service.
Thanks to District 62 for allowing me to present a workshop on the Toastmost.org club website hosting service and the underlying software. This was a quick tour through the advantages of WordPress, how to work with the WordPress editor, and how to create and modify your agenda using my extensions for Toastmasters. I’ve been invited back to present a more advanced website and agenda administration session on October 25.
Workshop @ District 62
The full replay is embedded above, but you can also click any of the links below to skip to any of the topics I’ve highlighted.
Q&A begins (about the last 20 minutes, covers topics like going back to see previous agendas and member role history)
I recommend that viewers also look at the video course I created, which is broken up into series of lessons on different aspects of the platform. However, the advantage of these live demo sessions is that they provide participants with the opportunity to ask questions.
Their questions, in turn, help me understand what I need to explain better — and often lead to improvements in the software itself. An example from this workshop was the woman who asked how a club that alternates between two meeting schedules should set up its agenda. See the section below.
Bonus lesson: How to modify your meeting schedule
During the Q&A for the workshop at District 62, one of the participants asked how she could set support two different meeting schedules for a club that alternates between evening and noon schedules to accommodate the schedules of different members. I suggested establishing two different meeting templates, one for the evening meetings and the other for the noon meetings.
Having come across a similar request once before, I decided I should produce a tutorial covering all the ways you can alter your meeting schedule from changing the start and end times for a single meeting, to changing the template for all your upcoming events, to handling this split schedule scenario.
In the process of producing the video tutorial, I made some changes to the way the RSVPMaker event scheduling system works to make the process easier to explain — and which ought to make it easier to accomplish!
North Kent Community Toastmasters have seen our members grow from hesitant speakers into confident communicators, emerging leaders, and successful professionals. Share the evening of celebration with us. https://3442.toastmastersclubs.org/
Eloquents Toastmasters from Okemos will host a table at the Lansing Blues Fest, Sept. 15 & 16. Capital City TM will help with maintaining the table. Contact Aaron Sun at weida.a.sun@gmail.com for more information and to help in the effort!
Tuesday Talkers will be holding an Open House, promoting the club to Dow’s early career Employee Resource Group (ERG) RISE. This event will be held at Dow Fellows Hall at the Global Dow Center (GDC) at the Williard H. Dow Corporate Campus.
This event is invite only for non-Dow guests but open to all Dow Employees.
Non-Dow Guests, please send your name, phone and email address for security clearance to: klwalker2@hotmail.com
Refreshments will be provided and gift cards will be given to any who participate in Table Topics.
Hope to see you all there! Let’s make this a successful event!
Event Title: The Jackson Early Birds Toastmasters Spotlight Speaker Series Date: 9/13/2013 Time: 07:00 AM to 08:00 AM
Event Details:
The Jackson Early Birds Toastmasters Spotlight Speaker Series Proudly Presents Chief Executive Officer – LifeWays Maribeth Leonard, MBA, LBSW “Stay in Control of your Mental Health”
Location: 400 N Mechanic Street Jackson Mi. Christoff’s Community Room or Join us on Zoom Meeting ID: 898 0781 1839 Passcode: 736666400
3 Takeaways you can expect: 1. Obtain a basic understanding of the UPGRADED Pathways 2. Get your Pathways questions answered. 3. Learn to master Base Camp Manager.
This is the semi-annual District Business Meeting where District Council members decide the business of District 62.
The important items to be discussed and voted on at this meeting are:
1. Approval of the Agenda for this meeting
2. Approval of last Spring’s Business Meeting minutes
3. Approval of this year’s District Budget
4. Approval of appointed positions
The meeting is open to everyone, but only Club Presidents, Club Vice-Presidents Education and District Executive Committee (DEC) members are allowed to vote.
Registration is required. The meeting is scheduled from 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm. Please Register here and download the documents to review before voting.
Wednesday September 20, 2023 7:00 PM EDT to 8:00 PM EDT
District 62 has partnered with Toastmost.org, a club website service based on the popular WordPress software, to help clubs modernize and make more effective use of their club websites. The district’s own website is also supported by Toastmost, which includes features for event and email marketing as well as more club-specific functions like managing meeting agendas and signing people up for roles. A good club website should help you market your club, recruit new members, and organize your meetings.
We’re planning to make this the first of several workshops covering different topics. In this introductory session, Toastmost’s creator David F. Carr will cover the basics of how to create a Toastmost site and why you might want to.
While the Toastmost option is not free like the default Free Toast Host websites most clubs continue to use, moving to WordPress allows you to take advantage of much more powerful tools for promoting and managing your club. For example, WordPress sites do a much better job of automatically reformatting for display on a mobile phone — which will likely be the experience for at least half of your audience.
In addition to introducing Toastmost to clubs who have not yet tried it, this session will include Q&A time for club leaders who want to use their website more effectively.
Toastmasters District 62
