After serving as club officer in your club, what is the expected job of Area director ? How much workload for a volunteer position ?
This can vary greatly depending on the District’s culture and the ambitions of the District Director, as well as your Division Director. Some Division Directors are micromanagers; others are rarely around. In the first District I worked in, the culture was extremely intense, and I had to work very hard. The second District was more relaxed, with a “mom and pop” atmosphere. Other Districts I’ve volunteered in tend to fall somewhere in between. It can vary widely.
“I want to know what the time commitment is for being an Area Director.”
One thing you’ll notice immediately is that some Area Directors during your Division year are “all in” and invest a lot of hours, while others do the minimum. Either way, they will receive the same credit, so you’ll want to take that into consideration. Depending on your District, you may be involved with speech contests once or twice a year. In many Districts, this can be an extremely stressful experience, or it may not be at all. You may also be expected to volunteer at the District conference.
There are two periods of exhaustion and low morale.
The first is around springtime (April, after the system recalibrates the metrics), when you’ll likely receive a strong message from the District Director (and possibly the Division Director) to drive membership. Sometimes the messaging isn’t entirely ethical, so be prepared for that.
If you have a Fall contest, keep in mind that you’ll have Club Officer training from June to August (where you may be asked to participate in Toastmasters Leadership Institute and conduct makeup Club Officer Training sessions). Then, contest season runs from August to October, during which you’ll participate in your contest and help with others. On top of that, the District Trio may ask you to run membership drives. So, you could be looking at four months of non-stop work until the holiday season. Depending on the District’s culture, they may also expect you to be available during the holiday season for District Executive Committee (DEC) meetings and other events. Again, this varies by District.
The most challenging aspect of being an Area Director is shifting your mindset from viewing Toastmasters as an educational entity to seeing it as a numbers-driven business. You’re now essentially in sales and marketing, following a distribution network (or Multi-Level Marketing) model. Your job is to train the “sellers” (Club Officers) to either maintain a strong membership (>20 members) or improve their membership, and to ensure that the club meetings align with the Toastmasters brand. The former is more important to Toastmasters International than the latter.
Toastmasters Leadership Institute (TLI) and officer training are how they initiate this process, and you may be asked to work very hard to train your officers. But that’s not the real purpose. There are two main objectives for Club Officer Training (COT): introducing and selling the Distinguished Club Program (DCP) incentives to the club so they are motivated to operate like a business, and assessing how engaged each club is in its business operations. If you have to work very hard to train a club, congratulations—you now know this is a club you’ll need to work closely with all year to help improve their business operations.
It’s not about the DCP; it’s about increasing membership payments. As an Area Director, your goal is to sell the DCP incentives to the Club President and Vice President of Education, but your real objective is to increase membership. Think of the clubs as the first level of a downline. What matters most is achieving the 20-member charter strength metric and the +4 DCP metrics. Focus on getting clubs engaged in this as early as possible (i.e., during the summer). Don’t worry too much about educational awards or DCP points; concentrate on motivating them to hold Open Houses and sign up new members as soon as possible. If they don’t know how, train them. If they’re unwilling, offer to help. If they remain resistant, decide how you want to proceed.
If you can get clubs to reach the 20-member threshold early, the rest of the year will be much easier. If not, the journey will be more challenging and may lead to greater resentment. Unfortunately, many Districts won’t communicate this to you until the spring, by which time you may already be exhausted. Some District Directors may even ask you to sign up for clubs or pay for memberships, because in the end, they’re focused on the numbers—not the DCP points.
Additionally, decide early on whether you want to put in the effort to try to form a new club. If so, work very hard on this before the holiday season, because attendance drops off during that time. If you choose not to, you may still be strongly encouraged to do so.
In terms of skillset, you’ll be wearing two hats. You’ll need to be as customer-service oriented or as pleasant as an HR representative, while also acting as a sales trainer to help clubs improve their overall health by meeting your own sales targets. Again, don’t worry about educational awards; that’s not your concern. Focus on membership numbers. If clubs are actively growing, it’s likely they’re running their educational program well enough to earn their awards.
Educational awards do not drive membership retention. You may have been told otherwise, but the actual statistics show that turnover remains constant regardless of whether a club has no educational awards or 100. What matters is aligning the club’s meetings with the Toastmasters brand to attract guests and make the club easier to market. Membership. Membership. Membership. Sometimes you’ll hear from the District Trio that a well-run club will earn its DCP points. What they actually mean is that a club being run well as a business—actively growing and aligned with the brand—will earn its DCP points. But a club that’s run well but still has only 15 members is not considered a “well-run club” by the District.
Regarding workplace politics, quickly evaluate who in the District chain can help you and who cannot. Ignore their Distinguished Toastmaster designation and don’t place too much value on their formal title—neither guarantees they’re qualified for the job. And often, the most competent people might not hold any title at all.
Also, understand that if you seek help, especially from highly competent volunteers, they may ask for a favor in return, which will require you to put in more time. It’s a tit-for-tat situation. There are also power dynamics and sometimes bad blood among volunteers. Don’t get involved in that; it’s just like any other workplace—keep your head down and focus on your work.
Finally, let go of the idealism or core values. “It IS a business.” “It IS about the numbers.” My District Governor told me that when I served as an Area Governor, and that person is now a Past International Director. Your role is to help clubs improve their business operations, enhance their sales performance, and generate revenue for Toastmasters International. If they do a good job, you validate their work. Hopefully, your work will be validated as well. Around November, someone might talk you into running for Division Director. It’s not always the case, but it happens. When your term ends, you can decide whether this is the life you want—working the business—or if you want to return to your club and enjoy the life you had there. Either way, you’ll never see Toastmasters the same way again.
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