Are you the SAA for your club? Better still are you beginning a new term as the SAA for the club? If yes, here’s a dilemma you may face. Too often, SAA feels stuck about the right message to open the meeting. You might greet everyone good morning/evening, state the ground rules and then invite the president with a sigh of relief that your part is over. The problem is deep inside you know that’s a pathetic way of doing it, right?
As the SAA, it’s your responsibility to add some interest, some jazz right at the beginning of the meeting so that club members are hooked and the meeting is off to a brilliant start.
So the next strategy some adopt is starting off with a quote. While that is a good strategy but there are only so many times you can come up with a great quote which also happens to be brand new to other people. Starting with a quote like “Honesty is the best policy” that’s beaten to its death due to over use is only going to beat to death the spirits of club members.
So here is a fantastic strategy to find a great message every time you open the meet. Remarkable things have happened on every single day of the calendar at some point in the history. The date of your meeting may be the day a great scientific breakthrough happened, a significant global agreement was signed, or at the very least the birth/death of important people. Moreover this information is freely available on the net.
To start off with something exciting, pick up two of these events that may fuel people’s interest and then remind that the day also happens to be your club meeting.
Let’s take an example with today’s date i.e. 24th march. A SAA can open today’s club meeting with the following message –
A computer hacker learns that the entire world is hacked into a stimulated reality. And his job is lead humanity into undoing it. While he does so, the entire world is trapped… into the movie. Fellow Toastmasters, today was the day in 1999 when this story premiered and the entire world was hooked to “The Matrix” Today was also the day in 1951 when American Fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger was born and today happens to be the 347th meeting of our wonderful club. So let’s put up a big round of applause. Before we proceed with the meeting, let me quickly state the ground rules …
(Spell out the ground rules now and hand over the stage to the president.)
Isn’t this a wonderful way to open a meeting, one that also gets the audience hooked? So there you go, before every meeting, just Google interesting events that happened through the history on the day of the meet and you have a great opening message ready in minutes.
Do you have a similar strategy to give your meeting a brilliant start? Let us know.
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