Several years ago, while I was the Vice President Education (VPE) of a Toastmasters club, I introduced the Easy Speak meeting management software to automate meeting planning and to track and support members' development. The software is very good, however it's one weakness (at that time at least) was that the meeting agendas it produced were quite plain. They didn't contain any information about the club like some other club agenda's did. I therefore decided to augment the automatically-produced agendas by blending them with some information of my own.
What I came up with was a booklet-style meeting agenda that needed to be printed double-sided on a single piece of A4 paper and then folded. It is very important that A4 paper is used because, unlike the American Letter format, A4 has a very special characteristic: When you fold it in half, it retains exactly the same shape. That means this document can be printed
If you want to use it, you should do the following:
- download the Word document from here.
- modify it by adding in your own club details including club officers, website etc.
Then every time you want to use it for your club event you must:
- paste in the details of your meeting into page 3 and 4 of the document. If you are using Easy-Speak, this will be produced by the system. If your agenda fits on a single page, you can use page 3 of the document for educational or inspirational material.
- Then print the document. You should print it two pages per sheet and double-sided, ideally in colour. It is likely to take some trial and error with the printer settings to get it to print correctly. Do NOT change the order of the pages if it doesn't print correctly first time (the last page of the booklet is the first page of the document on purpose, and the two middle pages of the booklet must be the last pages of the Word document).
- Then the last step is to fold the paper down the middle to form it into a booklet.
If you make any changes to the booklet, be sure keep it in line with Toastmasters branding. You can find a guide on their website.
Anatomy of the cover pages
The items in the dark red callout boxes below should not need to be changed. Those with the purple callouts should be localized to your club. Only the section with the gold callout should be customized per meeting (optionally – there is no obligation to change it per meeting).
