Toastmaster
Hosting the Meeting
The main duty of the Toastmaster is to act as a genial host and facilitate the entire program, including introducing participants. The instructions are on pages 75-76 of the Communication and Leadership manual. Someone should always be at the lectern - each participant who controls the meeting should receive and return control at the lectern only. This exchange should be done with a firm handshake, direct eye contact and a smile!
Meeting Theme
In our club, the VP of Education typically comes up with suggested meeting themes, but the Toastmaster is permitted to alter or entirely change the theme if he/she chooses to. For example, one theme was "Peace of Mind" and the Toastmaster changed the theme to "Peace of Heart". That is another theme entirely. If you change the theme, you might want to coordinate with your VP of Education if you need additional help planning something new.
Phone Calls
Before the meeting, the Toastmaster contacts the General Evaluator, all Speakers, the Table Topics Master, the Opener, the Hot Seat, Videographer and Microphone Wrangler. These calls should be completed by 8 p.m. on Sunday night before the meeting.
Agendas
The Toastmaster is responsible for preparing the agenda. When creating the agenda, don't forget to get the speakers' speech titles and speech information (i.e. which speech number from which manual, and the basic objectives) before putting together the agenda. The speech objectives should be included in the agenda! That way the evaluators do not need to spend precious evaluation time reviewing the speech objectives! If the speaker is doing a speech from an advanced manual that you haven't done before, then you will need to make sure to get that information well-ahead of time since you won't be familiar with the objectives. The Toastmaster also needs to prepare introduction information for the speech presenters (not for the minor roles, General Evaluator, or Table Topics Master). This introduction information can help the speaker better set the stage for his or her speech. This link about introducing speakers on the Traffic Toastmasters web site may offer some ideas.