1. We are tracking our goal of 9-12% growth in number of clubs

2. We are conducting contests in Zulu and  Afrikaans (subject to formal approval by the Directorate at the directorate meeting on Saturday 3 March)

3. Our alignment committee tells me they are suggesting NINE Divisions. We need your input on the new Area alignment when it is finalised, again after 3 March.
4. Club Officer training was a huge success — nearly 75% of clubs were trained!

5. How you can help: Please help get our clubs paid-up. There are some clubs that just haven’t paid. It’s such a privilege to belong to Toastmasters that it’s a pity that some clubs just can’t get it together to pay.

I have had the privilege of attending a 40th birthday celebration and a charter dinner within the space of a week. Here is a video of Scientia Toastmasters’ 40th birthday celebration – they’re older even than District 74!

We are meeting our goal of 9-12% Growth in clubs

We have the following clubs that have either chartered, or are about to charter.
* Business Engage (Sunninghill)
* Business Engage (Mercedes Benz)
* Business Engage (Cape Town)
* JSE Trading Words
* CIMA
* Consumer Goods Council
* Bidvest (Panalpina)
* EQSTRA
* DynaBytes
* Moot Toastmasters
* Bacon and Egg Toastmasters
* The Breakfast Club (Cape Town)

And we have strong interest from
* Woodmead — a club at a business called Quirk
* A community club in Bryanston
* A club in Witbank
* A club at Hollard Insurance
* A CIMA club in Pretoria (will probably be a community club)
* Denel

And there are some leads that are not as certain:
* Bulawayo
* Underberg
* Phalaborwa

We will lose these clubs:
* CIDA — it is an uphill battle finding funding for these students
* Medihelp — this corporate decided Toastmasters was not for them.

Educational awards are on track

Our LGET tells me that if everybody does what they say they want to do, we will have 300 CCs this year! Can you imagine that?

Member payments are also up

We have reached over 50% of our member payments goal, which is healthy and is a sign of a growing district.

Here is the District Govenor address for this weekend’s training.

District 74 now has permission to run Speech Contests in more than one language!

They’re easy to start, goes the reputation. And the fail just as quickly. And they need a lot of work.

Some of our best clubs are community clubs — Taverners; 4th Dimension in Bryanston. And of course, Standard Bank Ops — a corporate club. as well as Byte your Tongue, of course, which rocketed to Presidents’ Distinguished in two years.

So the insight we got was, it’s not to do with the corporate club, per se. It’s to do with the support the corporate gives the club.

If we can persuade our corporate partners to help their own clubs become distinguished, then our job is much easier.

So we decided to have a Corporate summit: here is the video.

Corporate Summit Video

The goal is to start at least five clubs.

The benefits include:

* Existing corporate clubs will need less work from District — their own corporations will support them just as much as we do

* Corporate partners will start more clubs. The Canadian Revenue Service has 30 clubs. Why don’t our banks have that many?

* Corporate clubs will help support community clubs, such as in Alex, Soweto and other areas

After the District training, there was, of course, the Convention.

One of the happier duties we had was to go on to the stage during the Hall of Fame, and pick up our Distinguished District award.

I couldn’t have been more proud of this district, or of Rob, Keryn and Francois’s leadership as we made our way on to that stage to collect our awards.

Members of our cabinet carried our banners — we have two now — and we looked absolutely fantastic in our red shirts, organised by Frances Fraser, Paul Jensen and Francois Rossouw.

We were the ONLY District IN THE WORLD who had branded shirts — can you believe that? I think we’re going to set a trend!

• I think we’ll set a trend for wearing District shirts
• I think we’ll set a trend for being Distinguished
• and I think we’ll set a trend for bringing in proxies. Nearly 75% of our clubs had proxies at the convention. That’s a huge improvement over last year, and one of the best in the world.

But most of all, I think we’ll set a trend for simply pride in ourselves.
Pride for taking our place on the top stage;
Pride for stepping into our leadership position;
Pride for being part of Region 11 — the top performing region in the world.

And if you’d like to see what it looks like, here’s the video, shot using my video camera by an anonymous Toastmaster from the audience.

This is an American organisation and the Americans like democracy. So there’s lots of voting going on.

If you’re a President or VPE, you get one vote each. So each club has two votes. You carry the votes to the conference, which is why we need you to COME TO CONFERENCE.

It’s an opportunity to change stuff in Toastmasters District 74.
One thing I’d like to see discussed again is our contests.

We’re the only district in the world that does THREE contests in May and ONE contest in September. Everybody else does it TWO in May and TWO in October.
This is probably a hang-over from the days when we used to have FIVE contests in District. In those days we had a Bilingual contest as well.

Toastmasters changed the policy and limited us to only FOUR contests a year.
This means that in May, the club contest, area contest and division contests finish very late. It’s a long evening, and it can be quite cold as well (it happens in the late autumn, early winter).

So one proposal at the last AGM was to even it out a bit.
And we can do that.
But we need your vote!
Here’s some more information about Africon.
Your club budget should allow you to send a President and VPE to Conference.
I’ll be there! I hope to see you too!

You’ve probably just completed Club Officer Training and are full of enthusiasm for the new year. So am I, of course.

During the year, the plan is that your Area Governor will be making her or his presence felt a bit more. The idea is to take this District to the next level.

We are the smallest District in Region 11 — we’re about half the size of District 71 (the UK and Ireland) and District 59 (western Europe).

We’ve got 35 clubs fewer than 1996 and 12 clubs fewer than 2005 — so we’ve been shrinking instead of growing.

But we’re back on track — we’ve grown by a net of 6 clubs in the last year, and we should easily double that target this year. District 59 grew by 44 clubs! Isn’t that amazing?

Our very first job this year is to make sure every club with 12 members or fewer has a club coach. Our cabinet meeting is on Sunday, so I’ll keep you posted. In the mean time, we’re concentrating on these four targets for every meeting.

* 20 people at the meeting. This allows us to reach our CL goals

* A minimum of 60 speeches per year per club. This allows us to reach our CC goals.

* One member per month per club: this makes sure we meet our membership goals of 20 members per club minimum plus a growth of 8

* All admin up to date. I’ll be talking to you about that closer to the time.

Please get in touch with me here. Email me, phone me — I’d love to hear from you.

Regards

Erich Viedge

ACS, CL