Online Toastmasters Communities

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Lately I've been taking more and more opportunities to interact with some of the communities that I have found for Toastmasters online. One example is the The Official Toastmasters International Members Group on LinkedIn. This is a great place to ask questions of a general nature about Toastmasters or just interact with a wide swath of other Toastmasters and see posts and articles about public speaking and leadership.

In particular this has been a good place to ask questions and research information about being an area director. I recently posted a question asking for people to share if they're part of a Toastmasters area that acts as a community, and came to learn of a fun-sounding "club ambassador" program that some districts have done to encourage members to share best practices amongst clubs by giving incentives to those who visit other clubs. The visiting member gets extra credit for performing a meeting role during the visit. As someone who's enjoyed a bit of "Toastmasters tourism" in the past, I love this idea. I feel like I've gained a lot as area director from the meetings I've attended because of the requirement to visit the clubs in my area at least twice during the year.

Another very useful community I found online is the Pathways Discussion Forum on Facebook. This group describes itself as an "unofficial Forum for Toastmasters to discuss experiences, ask questions, and offer ideas, information, and insights regarding Pathways." (Pathways is the new educational program that Toastmasters rolled out across the world in the last couple of years.) Pathways adoption has been a sticking point and a struggle for some of our clubs, and continues to be. This community is full of people who have experience with the same challenges and can answer just about any question you might have about any path that's available in the program. When I started the blogging project I looked there to find out what others were doing in terms of blogging, and found a couple of other bloggers to follow.

Those are my two main go-to communities for finding answers online. What resources do you use? Have you found any particularly worthwhile online communities?


Top image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

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