We have had a history of innovations, We started as a Saturday morning club back in 2007 when it was still kinda taboo to have a weekend club back then, And we remain a Saturday morning club after 17 years when traffic has grown and made it difficult to hold weekday meetings. We had erstwhile or earlier speakers evaluate subsequent speakers due to lack of evaluators. This was to address the lack or scarcity of evaluators. After doing a speech and with speech out of the way, doing an evaluation is a fresh start. Technically, you could have X – 1 evaluators for X number of speakers. Speakers develop faster taking on a prepared speech and an extemporaneous speech (evaluation) in a single meeting. This allowed us to have as many as 8 speakers for consecutive weeks back then and not having to add a day for meetings.
In 2009, we had the first Facebook page in the district. We also had our Facebook Group but only got it useful in 2018 when we decided that it house our speech videos for privacy. We also had our website with the domain name “toastmasters.ph” and very own host. Back then we got members through SEO or search engine optimization. This was to learn another form of communication and to learn the innards of setting up a website.
Then came the pandemic in 2020. We were among the first clubs to go online in the world, not just the district, as we had participated in the official Toastmaster study group for online clubs back in 2014. And post-pandemic we remain the only consistent and properly-equipped hybrid club in the district. The hybrid setup allowed us to have provincial and foreign members. With the oversaturation of social media, we were still able to get members in numbers through content marketing or through relentless Facebook posts everyday. So let us not neglect guests in our meetings. Don’t consider them walk-ins as they are a result of a comprehensive marketing effort.