• Did you know that the front Home page of your site is the first landing page for visitors?
• Do you know how to add pizzazz to the Home page and invite your visitors in?
• How will you make use of the Membership tools for promoting your club?
• Are you the Web Master, VPE, VPM or VPPR for your club?

Then this article is for you! Let’s visit the King Arthur’s Playground easy-test site and see how the team are managing their club promotions.

Step 1: Manage the Home Page

Home Page Essentials

First we need a welcome message; bright colorful imagery; correct  meeting information; and a link to being a guest. In my opinion Peter Pan (IT Support) is providing all of these clearly on the home page of King Arthur’s, shown above. Some of these web parts are automatically in place for you once you have completed the Club Setup. For instance the Meeting dates and times; locations and Club Affiliations. You don’t have to do anything more to those! How easy is that!

Next we want to consider what further information our visitors will need and add those web parts to the Home page. Background story for the club, advice to participants and a list of future meetings. See our King Arthur’s example below where a couple of extra web parts have been added: Toastmasters Mission, Toasty-Tip and a link to Facebook. This is what you see when you scroll further down the Home page.

My recommendation is that you choose the web parts carefully to help in the promotion process. I also advocate that one member of the team should be the one to update frequently and add extra notifications of upcoming special events in one or two lines.

For example:

“King Arthur’s Club has scheduled their Club Contests during August – come and see how they shape up to represent us in the Area Contests this year.”

Step 2: Manage Member Status

Minnie Mouse (VPE) at King Arthur’s, is now planning to ensure that any visitors to the club, enticed by the information on the home page, will be able to receive email notifications about future meetings.

She needs to open the Control Panel for this and enter the Member Status screen. Above is what she sees when selecting the Member status of Guest! Minnie ensures that the options for receiving Meeting emails is selected as Yes. (Note: if she is editing here, she must click the Save icon at the bottom of this screen to action that change for all Guests.)

After receiving information from a Guest who has visited the home page and now wants to be a Guest at the next meeting, but is not sure of how to do that, Minnie can now add the new person to site as a User with status of Guest.

This new user with Guest status will receive the Meeting email reminders that are sent out by Minnie when the Agenda is ready.

Step 3: Manage Prospective Members

Whilst Minnie is checking the User List, she finds that there are a few prospective members who need following up. She sends that list to the VPM Gandalf the Wizard.

Gandalf can now enter the User List and select each one of the Prospective Members and then select the email icon to send a standard message to them both.

For instance:

“Thanks for being a Guest at King Arthur’s, we valued your attendance. If you are considering joining the club please do contact me by reply email.”

Gandalf could also followup on the Guests who have visited the clubs and change their status to Prospective Member if required.

By using the easy-Speak Member Management tools the Club Executive Officers can all work together to promote, recruit and sign up new members!

Some of these steps will be featured in the upcoming Webinar Series from the easy-Speak Help Desk! Details of these are located here for promoting to your easy-Speak colleagues.

You will need to RSVP and register for these by joining the easy-speak Toastmasters Community.