Executive Commitee Meeting

Executive Committee which met at Russell Library 6/21/2007 at 6:30 p.m.

Members in attendance: John Keppler, Janet Argenta, Nancy Green, Rob Schaff, Elliot Essman, Tom Alvord, Eliot Lofman, Cheryl Mason

Presiding Chairman: Tom Alvord

1. Tom called the meeting to order

2. Outgoing officers provided a brief year end report:
- VP Ed/Nancy reported the club is on track for earning the President’s Distinguished award
- Treasurer/John reported financial activity for the last year, ending balance $469.62
- VP Membership/Tom reported 17 members as of July 2006, 20 members as of June 2007: 18 active and 2 “paper members”. Tom also provided a number of interesting membership statistics, including: 43% of prospects who showed interest became members, 56% of guests became members, over the last year 23 people showed interest in our club, 18 of these prospects because guests, and 10 guests became members. Elliot Essman thought these retention rates are somewhat above average.

3. Tom welcomed each of the new officers for the coming year:
President: Tom Alvord
Vice President Education: Rob Schaff
Vice President Membership: Janet Argenta
Vice President Public Relations: Nancy Green
Secretary: Cheryl Mason
Treasurer: John Keppler
Sergeant at Arms: Arun Sodani

4. New officers described their roles:

Tom:
- Keep an eye on over all progress of the Club
- Support officers in their goals
- Help connect officers with resources
- Call on officers to report regularly at Club meetings
- Try to help continue the excellent Club meetings we’ve been having
- Take an active role in a mentor program which might better be called a “contact person” program.
- Pay close attention to Membership recruitment and retention: Shoot for a goal of 25 so at the end of the year we won’t have to scramble to have 20 members.

Rob:
- Likes the self-paced nature of Toastmasters
- Continue to keep track of Members progress via the speech and leadership manuals.
- Contact each member to see where they are with their goals/plans
- Continue to upgrade and maintain the website with the aim of having someone else take over the task after about 6 months.

Janet:
- Said she’s so new she’s just getting some idea of what the job is and why didn’t we tell her it was this complicated!
- She expressed a desire to do what she can.
- She likes the idea of making new people feel welcome and thinks she can do that.
- She is very interested in working with us and learning as much as she can.

Nancy
- Plans to advertise our club through newspapers, notices in public places
- Have a Club business card each member can carry for distribution.
- Have our web address on the card.

John
- Keep doing what he’s been doing for the past 5 years
- All agreed he’s doing a tremendous and invaluable job

Cheryl
- Asked what she should be doing (she decided just at the beginning of this meeting to volunteer for this job)
- Nancy gave her the secretary’s manual
- Will take minutes of meetings and report them on the web to members.
- Some others mentioned what a valuable service it is to read the summaries of regular Club meetings.

5. Meetings:
· Suggestion by Elliot E. to add a short new segment into the meeting sequence: Each speech evaluator (from their own seat) describes the objectives of the prepared speaker’s speech BEFORE the Toastmaster introduces the speaker. That way the audience will know what the goals of the speech are and can provide constructive feedback accordingly.
· Suggestion by Tom to have officers periodically provide activity reports to the club for their prospective areas of responsibility
· Suggestion by Nancy to continue with the business meeting portion of the meeting for officer reports as well as any announcements

6. Other Discussion: Elliot E. volunteered to be a club coach – available to answer member questions, help with speeches, etc.

The meeting adjourned at approximately 8:00 pm.