So you’ve decided to join Toastmasters. Congratulations! You may have some scary times early on if you’re a sissy like me, but if you get into a good club it will be one of the best things you ever do.

 

How do you find out about clubs in your area? There’s no bad way, but some are better than others.

 

Google

Google is not as good a way to find a club as you may think. For full disclosure, I’m a Microsoft employee so I’m sure you’ll take this with a grain of salt.

 

The first problem with Google is that it relies on the club having a website. There is a push to get clubs to do this, but not all of them have one yet. Don’t assume that a club is no good just because it doesn’t have a presence on the web. Toastmasters has a wide mix of the population and some clubs skew older or don’t have computer savvy members. Demosthenes, Cicero, and Lincoln never used a computer to my knowledge but they were “reasonably good” public speakers.

 

Let’s say you’re in Kirkland, Washington and you Google “Kirkland toastmasters.” At the time of this writing, the first hit is a sneaky club in Redmond, WA that played with its keywords to make itself come up on top. (It’s my club, though I can’t take credit for scamming Google.) After that there’s an article that references a really great Kirkland club, Kirkland Eclectics, but you have to scroll down about fifteen pages to find out about it. You’ll have to do a lot of browsing around to get the full list of Kirkland clubs, find their times, whether they’re open to the community or business clubs, and so on. There’s better ways.

 

In defense of Google, Microsoft’s search engine or anyone else’s has the same problems. I have to pick on Google a bit in the vain hope of helping my poor stock price.

 

Toastmasters.org and Your District Website

As amazing as Google is, the next problem with using it is that that it’s not optimized to find Toastmasters clubs. It has to search for women’s shoes, the history of gravy, and everything else under the sun. It has to be really good at just about everything, so it’s hard to be perfect at specific things.

 

This is where the good people at have Toastmasters Headquarters have helped us. They created a customized search application for clubs that almost is perfect. If you go to Toastmasters.org very prominently you’ll find displayed “Find a Club.” Not only can it search based on location but it can give you AM/PM clubs and even let you filter by which day of week the club meets.

 

Toastmasters.org is probably good enough to get you going, but some Districts have their own websites and have additional search options. A District is a bunch of clubs related geographically (over 100 usually). Check out here to find out what district you’re in.

 

Then back to Google (uhm, msn.com) to search for “District <your district> Toastmasters.” My District, District 2, has a really cool mapping feature that overlays club locations on a map of the area. For the Eastside of the Greater Seattle area, check out here.

 

From a Buddy Already In Toastmasters

When I joined Toastmasters I knew no one in the organization. But if you do have a buddy, ask him or her for a “hookup.” It could be their club, which has the added bonus that you have someone to introduce you around. If your friend’s club doesn’t work, your friend may know of good clubs to point you to.

 

When you visit a club, you’re under no commitment to join. A lot of people visit multiple clubs to find the best one for them. But how can you tell? I’ll take that up in my next post.