Public relations in Toastmasters

In Toastmasters, we share responsibilities. We take roles in our meetings supporting each other, providing each other opportunities to practice public speaking by taking various functionary roles. Among these is our effort to publicize our clubs.

We run our clubs ourselves and one very important aspect of it is membership building, and one of the most important element of membership building is public relations. We need to publicize our clubs to recruit new members because there are some members who have to decide to leave the club, some for personal reasons, others for job-related reasons, and still others for family reasons. Whatever their reasons, it's a fact that some members have to leave at some point in time. Thus, we need to keep recruiting new members to sustain our club, a place for us to hone our skills.

Personally, I love to engage in public relations activities, writing articles, posting them on our website, social media platforms, interacting with other members on and around our social media accounts. It provides me with precious opportunities to write in English and put together my thoughts into one organized piece of writing, which should help me construct my speeches.

There's one misconception that a lot of people have. They believe in efficiency. I doubt it. It doesn't work that way. If you are selling products, you can run ads and sell your products to whoever gets interested. Yet, we are not selling products. We are trying to find new friends. In Toastmasters, we support each others. It means we need to reach the "right" people, the kind of people who share our visions and values. That is not really easy to do by simply placing some ads here and there. We need to be communicating what we do on a regular basis. We need to inform our prospective members of what we do, what we value, and what we appreciate. Sometimes, we need to let them know what they are expected of as a member, not just what's in it for them. We need to "educate" our prospective members of the responsibilities and obligations in addtion to the benefits of being a Toastmaster. That is why running ads doesn't wrok in recruiting members for a Toastmasters club. We need to keep our public relations efforts up and running all the time.

In Toastmasters, having a solid public relations team that perform effective, not efficient, public relations activities to be successful in membership building. And being involved in the club's public relations activities provide members extra opportunities to be a better public speaker. There is no reason not to be involved. It's a win-win.