One of the biggest challenges in growing a club is getting new guests to walk through the door. In today’s day and age most engagement is done through the internet. You need the club marketed online and offline. Effective recruitment requires discovering effective lead generators and fine tuning them.

Standard Lead Generation

What are the best lead generators? Ask your guests. Every club will be different in what works best for them. Size of your valley, demographics and the culture of the area make a difference.

After hearing what the guests in my club say here is the lead generators that work best ordered by effectiveness.

1. Meetup
2. Toastmasters.org / Club Website
3. Word of Mouth / Social Media

Meetup

Meetup is my club’s biggest lead generator. Any time a person looks in their area for a club they will come across Meetup. Its at the top of Google search results when searching for a group. If you haven’t used Meetup, you definitely should try it out. It has a yearly fee, but most of our guests and new members have found my club through it.

Check out the post for gaining new members with Meetup

Get people in the door

No matter what lead generator you are using they all serve the same purpose. Getting people in the door. All lead generators should do the following:

1. Show your club is active
2. Say what your club can do for them
3. When and where you meet

Showing your club is active is the most overlooked aspect. Before fine tuning my club website, the biggest question we received was if we were still meeting. People were intrigued by what Toastmasters could do, but they didn’t want to waste their time.

You can link you digital lead generators to active social media accounts, or even better, link to a Meetup with a healthy amount of RSVPs.

When most guests are asked how they heard about our Toastmasters club, the most common response is Meetup. Meetup is by far our biggest lead for new members.

Why is it effective?

Meetup is one of the largest platforms on the web to find groups and local communities. When a person looks for a new club to join, Meetup consistently arrives as one of the top search results.

Meetup’s biggest caveat is that is has a yearly fee to have your club listed. This con is its biggest pro. On Facebook and Instagram your club is never gonna be organically shown to others. The algorithm will show your group if it has engagement at least in the hundreds, which is hard for a club with 20-30 members. On Meetup, only people willing to pay will be shown, so your club is more likely to be seen.

Making a captivating event

The first thing most people will search for on Meetup is events, so we need to make sure we pop out!

Create a new Group for your club and create a reoccurring event with a catchy title such as “Unleash Your Inner Speaker – In Person”. Note how I added “In Person”. Now we have a title with an emphasis of how the meeting is attended. Its engaging and will attract anyone who is interested.

Our event should have a description that sells why people should come to the event. Explain what Toastmasters is and how it can help new members grow.

For the event photo, a genuine amazing photo of someone speaking works best. Using stock photos may look good but it will not come off as genuine. A stock photo can be used if you are unable to get a good photo.

How to gain more views

If you want to be seen more on Meetup, you will need need more engagement. By gaining engagement, my club rose higher on the ranks and now almost always is shown on the first page of search results in my valley.

The easiest way to gain this engagement is by RSVP your members to the events. First we need to ask everyone to join meetup and RSVP the first event. Ideally it would be best if everyone RSVP’d every time but this ends up being a hassle and less people RSVP as time goes on.

Thankfully Meetup has a feature where you can RSVP members for them. Go to any event, and you will be able to click manage on the Attendees. Make sure to RSVP anyone with a role for the next club meeting. If you have officers on the board, you can RSVP them for the meeting as well.

By having more RSVPs, your event be shown to potential new guests sooner. And when a stranger views your event, they’ll know your club is active from all the RSVPs you have.