Get your Zoom Account

Okay, now you are in good shape to schedule your first Toastmasters club meeting. Sure you may be a little nervous first time round, but if get your team involved and share the planning together, you will succeed. If you are going to use Zoom, I suggest that you first create your own free Zoom Account and get your Zoom Personal Meeting Room ID.

If you need help with that you can access these short video tutorials from Roger Fung, DTM at TIPathways.com I recommend this one to begin with:

Schedule Meeting

Next step is to schedule your meeting – I suggest you begin with a scheduled meeting to which you could invite just one or two members of your executive team.

First connect with your small team and determine a date and time which is suitable for all. You could just email, text or phone each person to settle on a meeting schedule. Allow about a 40 minutes for this first meeting – this is the limit to your time online with a free Zoom account for meetings with more than two people.

Next enter your Zoom account and select the Schedule Meeting function.

Fill in the details for:

Topic – anything you like

Start date and time – agreed meeting date

Duration – 40 minutes

Time Zone (if your team are in different time zones)

Use the personal meeting ID

Choose your calendar and click Schedule

 

Note: you may not want to set a password for a Toastmaster meeting. However, a password may be required for a private meeting. eg your Executive Team meeting.

For extra help in Scheduling your Meetings, access the Zoom Support site and choose from their Getting Started tutorials.

My next lesson will help you with ‘what to do when you are in your first Zoom meeting’.

Adding to Calendar

The next step involves adding your scheduled meeting to your calendar. I use a Google Calendar and when I schedule a meeting I am immediately taken to my Google Calendar where I can SAVE the details.

Note: the above screen image shows my scheduled meeting for today in the popup window. If I want to invite people to attend I can click on the Edit tool and add their email addresses and send.

Time Zone Tracking

An important consideration for those meetings that stretch across countries, states and time zones is how to notify the potential attendees what time the meeting is in their time zone. I use the World Clock Meeting Event Announcerto convert the time of my meeting into the time zones across the world.

Note: Here is the conversionfor the meeting held on 21 March 2020 at 7:00 pm AEDT (UTC 8:00 am)

• Every Time Zone has a handy slider that allows you to see what time it is across time zones
• The World Clock Meeting Planner from timeanddate.com allows you to input your team members’ different locations and then creates a table of suggested meeting times
• Worldtimebuddy lets you add your and your team members’ locations and then creates a table showing what time it is in each place

Source: Ultimate Guide to Remote Meetings

Promoting on your website

The next step, when your team is comfortable with their first meeting in Zoom, is to schedule a new meeting and invite your Toastmasters club members.

Then you promote it to your club.

You could create an Event in your Facebook Group or simply send the Google Calendar invite to all members via email.

Be prepared to send reminders in a timely manner.

Note: when promoting on your website ensure that you include the Zoom Personal Room ID and the date with start time clearly stated in your time zone. eg. AEDT or UTC. Be sure to add the Time Zone conversion link too.