One of the reasons why I set up this blog is to share the leadership experience that I had in Toastmasters, particularly during the years as District Governor, Lt. Governor Education & Training and Lt. Governor Marketing. It is also the encouragement of many members, especially in Facebook that asked me to write down these experiences as it will be valuable learning lessons for many.
One of the skills that I used when I became District Governor of Toastmasters International District 80 in Term 2008-2009 was to analyze the historical data of District 80 to plot out the trends of the 4 Critical Success Factors of the District and you can do that very easily with membership payments and educational awards. The historical trends tell you a good story about how the District is performing and give you good insights on key patterns and behaviors that will aid in developing your District Success Plan. You can view the past performances of your district right here by selecting your district number from the drop down menu.
Let me focus my leadership experience as a District Governor on membership payments and using historical data to help in planning.
One of the first things I did was to pull out the past data of the monthly membership payment figures of District 80 so that I can see the actual performance for each term on a monthly basis. The above chart shows the chart that I developed using the data collected and immediately, it will give you a good indication on the monthly payment trends. It also shows you critical periods that you need to focus on membership payment, especially during dues renewal periods of September and March.
It also tells you a story about the membership payment trends of the District and how effective the team have been working together to encourage clubs to pay their club dues early and promptly.
Using the data in the chart, you can compute the percentage contribution of each monthly membership payments of each term’s performance. These percentage figures will be useful in helping you to set your monthly targets for the membership payments figures that you need to hit each term. This simple method that I used is comes from my experience as a regional marketing leader for a US MNC and I need to develop the sales budget for next fiscal year. As you are aware that you do not get consistent monthly sales figures because there are some seasonal factors in selling your products.
Hence, this method will help you to:
- Develop accurate monthly targets of the membership payments
- Analyze and predict the seasonal factors in your district’s membership payments
- Focus on critical months of membership payment collection
- Give you an indication if you are doing fine on a month by month basis
There are further things that you can also do with the data and you can even plot out the charts as shown below:
The charts will give you a very good picture of the overall performance of your district and it tells you many many stories. You can analyze from the charts and identify the historical trends, similar to the charts. You can also see if some of the old trends are useful and you can decide not to include them when you start planning your monthly targets. For example, you notice that the membership payment trends for Term 2004-2005 are out of proportional to the historical patterns of the other terms and hence, this might be one set of data that you will not consider to use.
I hope this is a good start to sharing with you my leadership experience and how you can use information and data to aid you in your journey. The journey is tough and challenging and constantly, we get many opinions from members, like “we have too many clubs in our district” or “we have too many members”. We can debate over these issues without facts and as leaders, it is important that we make strategic decisions based on factual information that we have properly analyzed.
Measurable Leadership 