The theme for your Toastmaster meeting need not be boring or abstract always. You can also have some fun and teach your fellow club members something new and useful along the way.
Just look at the following idea for a Toastmasters meeting theme.
DO YOU HAVE WINGS ?
Hello Toastmasters, I have a very silly question for you today. Do you have wings? Okay, so is there any magical drink perhaps in a red and silver can that can give you wings? Did I hear Red Bull?
Fellow Toastmasters. Does red bull really give you wings? Back in 1987, when Red Bull was launched, the company needed a cool marketing trick to connect with their audience. So they came up with “Red bull gives you wings” and the rest is history. The company became a cult brand among its customers. When most people compare their product with Red Bull, they think Red bull had it easy. It was already a cool product but they are in an uncool business where they cannot build such a brand. So let me rectify this myth for you.
In the list of top 10 uncool games, Scrabble is right there at no 1, even ahead of Chess. Chess – a game where you have to make horses run with your fingers, where the king is reduced to a toddler taking just one step at a time. Scrabble beats them hands down. And yet scrabble came up with an insanely cool marketing plan. Few areas in Paris had really poor Wi-Fi. So Scrabble decided to give away free Wi-Fi but with one challenge. You had to download the scrabble application and create seven letter words from random letters in your screen to unlock the Wi-Fi password. Higher the score of your word, higher the free minutes you win. If you share your achievements on Facebook, you double your minutes. The result – in two weeks, over 6000 words were created and Scrabble received amazing amount of free Facebook posts and word of mouth publicity. So if a game as uncool as Scrabble could find its wings to fly, I am sure your business is no exception. Over the course of the meeting, I will share more such brand stories with you but first let’s see how a Toastmaster’s meeting works.
The meeting is divided into three parts. The first part consists of prepared speeches, where members prepare for a speech in advance, get it mentored and deliver the same. The second part is the exciting Table Topic session where anyone from the audience including the guest can come up and speak on a topic given by our Table Topic Master for 1 to 2 minute. And the final part is the most important evaluation section where our General Evaluator for the day will give a report card on the entire meeting – what went good and what went bad. On that note, let me invite our General Evaluator for the day TM Name.
Once the GE is done explaining his role, you may begin the First session. After all the prepared speeches are over, continue with the theme as under.
RELATED: As a good TMOD, it is your duty to appreciate your Prepared Speakers to soothe them. Find here how to do if effectively.
A television is a cool product with new features every year. An AC is a cool product because well it’s an AC. Even LED bulbs have become cool now with superstars promoting them. But think about a blender. Just sharp blades that rotate. Not that cool right. Wrong. Blendtec is an American company that sells high quality blenders. But do you know what its customer talk the most about. Not the blenders but a series of YouTube videos under the title “Will it blend?” If you check YouTube for this title “will it blend”, YouTube will show you a series of videos showing the blender trying to blend products like golf balls, marbles and coconuts. What’s more amazing – each of these videos have millions of views. They have become so popular that newer videos try to blend iPhones and amazon echo. I don’t need to tell you how many views they get. Think about it. Blenders – a product that gives you karela juice is the talk of the town. If they could find their wings, definitely you are much cooler than that. But now its time for the coolest session of our meeting. A session where any one came come up and find their 2 minutes of being cool and lime light – the Table Topic session.
Once the Table Topic Session is over, continue with the theme as under.
With all these stories I shared you, you might be thinking than only corporates or businesses can make their product cool and generate buzz around them. So let me break this myth for you as well. This story is about an NGO named Akshar Foundation that provides free education to kids who were earlier child labor. And it’s not just math, science or geography but subjects like carpentry, plumbing and electrical works as well so that they may earn as they study. One of the new subjects they started was plastic recycling. The school asked student to bring plastic waste which they gladly accepted as school fees. Mind you the school was not charging them anything earlier as well. They posted about this on their Facebook page and the entire world started talking about them. They found coverage in several media outlets like Times now, Times of India, Better India etc. People began visiting them and they received more donations. Now take a moment and think. Here is an NGO with hardly any marketing team or hardly any cool factor and yet one innocent post from them achieved what big companies can only dream about. All of this only goes on to show that it does not matter which industry you are in or how big you are. If you can find the inherent coolness in your business you too can create a buzz around your products like Blendtec or Scrabble or Akshar Foundation.
Now it’s time for the final section of our meeting – the Evaluation Section.
Once the evaluation section is over, you may wrap up the theme.
As we prepare the awards, let me talk about a couple of more products that found their cool factor with a twist.
Think about Amul butter or cheese. Hardly a novel product. But the company has an amazing marketing team. Every time there is any breaking news, Amul comes out with a simple graphic about the news with the Amul girl. Just do an image search of Amul ads on Google and you will find hundreds of example Every time Amul releases them, they go viral. People cannot stop sharing them over and over again.
Or take Bata for example. For a long time, people were convinced that Bata was not a cool footwear. It was for boring office or school shoes. Bata did two things – first it launched new range of exciting cool footwear and second it roped in hip celebrities like Sushant Rajput and Kirti Sanon to tell people about their cool new range. Now agreed that’s this is not something that a small business like yours can pull off. It takes deep pockets to do that. But just think about the idea – if Bata can convert its image, if blender can appear cool, then surely your business can do it as well.
It’s time now for the awards.
Think you have some other examples to include in this theme? Go on modify the content and see if the members in your club like it. Let us know in the comment section below.
For more information on how to play the role of the TMOD, read this article.
For more scripts and themes for the role of a TMOD, look here.
My Meeting Roles 