Why we built a database of meeting theme ideas for Toastmasters clubs

As a small business focused on speechwriting, it is important to us that our customers be well equipped to deliver their speeches. We always suggest joining Toastmasters because it provides a great way to develop skills and get practice. 

When we started our business, we looked around to see what we could do to contribute. Our many years of involvement with Toastmasters clubs convinced us that we should help clubs improve the quality of their meetings. The solution we came up with was to build what we hope will become the world's best and most comprehensive free database of meeting theme ideas for Toastmasters clubs. 

Meeting themes are a recommended way of keeping club events interesting. But having a theme isn't enough because themes can be highly variable. On the one extreme a theme can involve the Toastmaster simply interspersing their remarks with trivia on some chosen subject, to, on the other extreme, the meeting being held in a totally different venue and with a totally different format. 

We are not suggesting that every meeting should have an elaborate theme.  But we do suggest that:

• every club should have a signature meeting that it becomes known for in its locality and that it holds every year.  
• every club that aspires to greatness should ideally hold more than one special meeting every year.  One a quarter is a good targaet. 
• every good club, just like every good Toastmaster of the Evening, should be ready to fill the time when a meeting goes badly wrong (when speakers all cancel for example). For this reason we have included meeting theme ideas that can be organised at the last minute with minimal planning. 

Providing clubs with meeting theme ideas is just part of what we are hoping to achieve. Our aim is to give clubs enough information on each theme idea so that they know how to run it themselves. 

We want this database to be really useful to clubs and to achieve that, it needs content. This is where we hope you can help us.  We are crowdsourcing the information, so if you have organized a meeting that you think the world should know about, please tell us about it using our submission form here. 

You can peruse the meeting theme idea database here. 

By Eamonn Ryan (DTM), WWS Co-founder