TL;DR We dropped out because of Pathways and because the Fall contest has been permanently cancelled.
I’ve been an on/off member of Toastmasters for 9 years. I’ve been a member of three different clubs, served as the president for two different clubs, and served in a number of other officer roles as well. I really credit Toastmasters with helping me dramatically improve my verbal communication skills.
Two years ago I decided to start a closed corporate club at my company with the help of another long time Toastmaster. Relatively soon after we started, Pathways was rolled out to our District. All of our members were new to Toastmasters, so we heavily pushed Pathways since no one was more than 2-3 speeches deep into the CC manual. Despite us pushing for Pathways, doing education session during meetings, etc, it never caught on.
In my opinion Pathways is fundamentally flawed and cannot be fixed. Everyone knows it is hard to use, poor UI, etc, but the problems are much deeper than that.
- The best thing about the CC manual was it’s simplicity. I can explain to a new member in 30 seconds how to get started. “Here is the manual, there are 10 speeches, work your way through them.” Every member is the club is familiar with those ten speeches and can help a new member with them. I worked in product development and it is a fundamental law of product development that the more friction you add, the fewer people will use the product. The level of friction in Pathways is so high that I saw almost none of our members actually do a project from Pathways.
- Pathways has a lot of hokey projects like doing a podcast, writing a blog, managing a panel discussion, running an online meeting, or developing a social media presence listed under many of the paths. Many members have told me these projects don’t really seem interesting to them and do not seem related to why they are there at Toastmasters. They are there at Toastmasters to just get comfortable getting up and speaking in front of other people. I believe many of Pathway’s projects fundamentally lack product/market fit.
So last October, when it was time to renew dues, our club decided to not renew and drop out of Toastmasters. The reason is because we had a couple dozen people paying $50 every 6 months and we felt like we were no longer getting any value for that money.
- Toastmaster’s Pathways education program was so difficult to use that no one was using it, and everyone was just doing ad-hoc speeches
- As a closed corporate club, Toastmasters did not help bring us new members
- We felt at least one big benefit of being a Toastmasters club and part of Toastmasters network was the contests. It is a chance to interact, challenge yourself, and learn from some of the best speakers of other clubs. However, since Toastmasters decided to cancel the Fall contest, there is now only 1 contest a year, and much less benefit.
Our club is continuing to run as a non-affiliated public speaking club since October and things have been going well. For other closed corporate clubs (and even open clubs), I would really encourage you to re-evaluate if Toastmasters is providing you your money’s worth for the dues you pay every 6 months or if you can run just as effectively independent from Toastmasters.
As a long time member of Toastmasters and someone who got a lot of value from Toastmasters, I really hope Toastmasters International will have the courage to reverse their decisions on Pathways and on the Fall contest before Toastmasters slowly atrophies away due to fewer new members sticking around and old members dropping off.
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