DG News

Here is an interesting timeline of the clubs in District 74, and when they were chartered. This first club to be chartered was Johannesburg Club, on 1 May 1950!, and the most recent is Personal Trust, which has just chartered.

It is interesting to see how the clubs start to exponentially grow as the years go by, and how the timeline seems to become more cluttered.

Hopefully we will have 29 more to add to the timeline this year.

Thanks to Erich Viedge for creating the timeline.

On Saturday evening, Winelands Toastmasters Club celebrated its 20th birthday. While 20 years is a remarkable achievement, Toastmasters International celebreated an even more remarkable achievement on Thursday, when it celebreated its 85th birthday!

Winelands, which is one of the older clubs in Cape Town, celebrated in style. They had a few of the original charter members present, as well as several of the district officers, including the area governor, division governor, district governor (me), and immediate past district governor (Lois).

Winelands Birthday

We had a wonderful three course meal, and several speeches, including a couple of manual assignments. I completed my cc2 (for about the 5th time!). While I seldom have Toastmasters events on a Saturday evening, it was nice to be able to visit the meeting without the mad rush of the week, and being able to relax and enjoy the evening.

Francios (Div Gov), Craig (District Gov), Linda (club president) and Andre (Area Gov)

Happy Birthday Winelands, here is to the next 20 years.

We are over 1/4 through the current Toastmasters year, and it is a good time to check on how we are performing against our goals.

In general, we are doing ok, but we need to keep an eye on the CC goals.

Explanation

At first sight, the graphs below might look a little confusing, but they are quite simple.

• The GOAL column show what we have set as our District stretch Goal.
• The DDP Goal shows what we need to achieve to be Distinguished. This is basically the minimum goal set for us. You will notice that our GOAL is usually higher than that.
• The TRACKING shows us where we are.

So for example, if we look at the membership payment figures below, you will see that we are a little above our DDP goal, but below where we would like to be.

Membership Payments

For the CC’s, we are a little behind where we would like to be, but we are doing ok.

CC

Here are the CL figures. We still have some catching up to do. You will also note that from here on there are no DDP goals; that is because they don’t count towards us being distinguished, but they do count towards us being select or president’s distinguished.

CL

And here are the advanced leadership goals. We are doing very well in both these areas.

AL and DTM

Hi everybody.

Here is my first video update – an experiment for me and for district. I am looking at the different ways in which our members interact, and one big way is via on-line videos, and especially via youtube. So I thought that I would give it a try.

I have posted a district diary update via a short youtube video. I have put the focus on content, with an emphasis on getting the message out, rather than to create a broadcast ready production, so it is rough and ready. Ideally, I would like to try to get something out every two weeks or so.

Please let me know if:

1. you think it is a good idea
2. you will listen to it
3. the quality is sufficient to get the information out

Anyway, enough commentary, let’s watch the movie…

Keep Growing People!

Craig

Reason #36 to attend the International Convention. You get to hang out with the champs!

Here is a six-part video – Conversation with the Champs. For many more free educational videos from Darren, check out his YouTube site.

Anyway, here are the videos.

Diary- next dates to take note of:

• 30 September 2009 Deadline for Nominations for ‘Young Toastmaster of the Year’ Award/ John Whiffen Helping Hand Award
• 30 September 2009 Exec reports to Conference committee due.
• 30 September 2009 End of Smedey Membership building challenge
• 10 October 2009 October dues renewals due to WHQ (for Dist Club recognition)
• 16 October 2009 Exec meeting
• 16 October 2009 Minicon – GrowCon, contest (humour) – 16-17 Oct 2009
• 17 October 2009 District Council Meeting
• 18 October 2009 District Officer Training (2)
• 22 October 2009 Toastmasters International’s Birthday
• 31 October 2009 First-round area governor club visits should be completed

We start our District conferences with a flag ceremony, whereby we present the nine flags of District 74 (10 if including USA). Now we do a similar thing at the International Convention, with the exception that the flags of almost all countries are presented, which is a total of almost 100 flags! It is quite an impressive and grand affair.

In fact if you are a flag bearer, you have to attend a 2 hour rehersal beforehand, just to make sure that you do everything correctly.

As your District Governor, I had the honour of carrying the flag of South Africa, and Lois carried the Malawi flag.

My with the South African flag, and Lois with the Malawi flag.

If case you are wondering why almost all, countries with only 1 or two clubs are not represented.

Just some of the flags on the stage.

If you are attending any of the future conferences chat to your District leadership, perhaps you can carry a D74 flag!

At the recent International Convention, we attended the Board of Directors Briefing. I have mentioned a few of the exciting highlights below.

Note that these are the combined world wide results. District 74 was not distinguished, we missed it by just a few CC’s and members. However, with your help, I am sure that we can be distinguished this year!

Anyway, here are the results:

Worldwide Results –records broken

• 56 Distinguished Districts – a record (we WILL be there next year)
• 1073 new clubs were chartered – a record
• Over 250,000 members – a record
• Highest number of distinguished clubs ever
• Toastmasters is now represented in 106 countries

Highlights from the board briefing

• No dues increases!!!
• Speech contest manual and rules to be revised and combined
• New e-learning modules in use, more to be created; see http://www.toastmasters.org/Members/OfficerResources/eLearning.aspx to view or complete the modules
• Guidelines to be created for the use of “non-official” Toastmasters-orientated websites
• Change from 8 to 14 regions. DNAR will become regions 11-14, with us falling into region 11, along with the Middle East, Europe, UK and Ireland.
• Social media guidelines to be created (eg use of Facebook, Twitter etc)
• Translation policy to be updated

Remember that not all change is progress, but all progress requires change.

One of our duties at the International Convention is to attend the AGM, and to vote on behalf of our clubs on Toastmasters business (you may remember us asking for your club proxy forms). We voted in our new international leaders, and on “Proposal A”, which will have huge benefits on our district.

Introducing our new leaders for 2009/2010 (the full list is on the TI website):

• International President Gary Schmidt, DTM
• Senior VP Pat Johnson, DTM
• Second VP Michael Notaro, DTM
• Third VP John Lau, DTM
• DNAR Director Keith Ostergard, DTM

Proposal A was passed by a majority vote of 69%. This means that

• District 74 will become part of a region (region 11)
• From next year, our District Trio (DG, LGET, LGM) will receive 2x training sessions, instead of just 1
• Semi finals and finals of the speech contests will be at the International Convention
• Basically, the districts outside Northern America will have the same status as the districts within Northern America

Details are on the TI website

Along with our LGM Keryn House, and LGET Rob Douglas, we have just completed our training at international convention. We joined 16 other districts from around the world to receive 1 1/2 days full of action-packed training. We have learned techniques tips and strategies to help our district to succeed, conflict management, team building, and to help our clubs and members to achieve.

Keryn, Craig and Rob at training

We also covered some of the activities and tasks that we should be working on, such as completing the district success plan, a fantastic document that helps us to map out our district goals, and to plan our year ahead. We also worked on our district finances, working out our district budget and spending for the year ahead. This will make Keith very happy.

I was also pleased to see how much of what we should be doing we are already doing. Being isolated from the rest of the world we can forget about the bigger picture of Toastmasters, and these two days was a reminder that we really are doing a huge amount right.

Here is a picture of us receiving our certificates from the Executive Director Dan Rex, incoming president Gary Schmidt, and international directors Mohammed Murad POH Kim Siong.

Training was also an opportunity to meet our international leaders, and to get to know them better, as well as some of the WHQ staff members. It was reassuring to see how much the staff and leaders really want to help us to achieve, and how they really are available to assist us, all we have to do is to ask.

So this afternoon, we start to interview the candidates for international office, I will let you know how that does.