Great Toastmasters Speech Evaluations don’t happen by accident.

How do you get them and how do you keep them?

Toastmasters speech evaluations are the key tool to improving your public speaking.

I just came across a speech evaluation that I have a picture of on my phone.

I don’t know why I had it. It didn’t have the evaluator’s name or the speech title on it. No date, no project, no recognizable phone number. Someone had sent a picture of it to me.

So… essentially, I had an evaluation that did nothing for me.

Are you struggling with the online evaluations process? Let’s put some thought into how we are handling our speech evalutions online – from the speaker side and from the evaluator side.

Intro

Do you want to improve your public speaking? Are you effective in spreading your message to impact the world? Toastmasters provides you with a fun and safe meeting to give you the opportunity to stretch and develop your public speaking skills online and on site. This is Toastmasters 101 and I’m your host, Kim Krajci.

Why we need Toastmasters speech evaluations

I’m attending an online conference this week about podcasting. This is my fifth year attending. Sadly, we’re not in person this time. Even more sadly, I’m watching these presentations online and I’ve seen a significant number of speakers who need Toastmasters. I want to give them Toastmasters speech evaluations.

But – it’s not a Toastmasters meeting. It’s where the rubber hits the road, as we say here in Akron, Ohio. These presentations are what we train for during our Toastmasters meetings.

This is why it is critical that we get and give good evaluations at our Toastmasters meeting. Look, if that guy who just gave an insightful, fact-full presentation that I feel was worth my time to listen to – but his slides were abominable – had taken this presentation to a Toastmasters meeting, I believe that someone – either his evaluator, the general evaluator, or just a fellow Toastmaster after the meeting – would have said, “Dude. Can’t read the slides. Don’t read from the slides.” That presenter could have changed just a few things to improve his presentation 100%.

Does your club assign evaluators at the meetings? I’d say that 75% of the time (a number I just made up) that our evaluators are appointed approximately 5 minutes before they start. That’s not 5 minutes before the meeting – too often I see the evaluators are the last people in the room and they get asked to step up at the last minute.

So, speakers, here are a few things you can do to improve your Toastmasters speech evaluations

Recruit your evaluator and get them to sign up in advance.

This is...