Toastmasters (TM) is an excellent and long-running nonprofit organization whose goal is to help its members master the fine art of public speaking. TM has been around for decades, since it was founded by a YMCA educational director Dr Ralph Smedley in 1923.
Toastmasters is almost entirely managed by volunteer staff. It is also very hierarchical, with several layers of organization starting with the local club, through the district level, and finally to the international umbrella organization. This structure presents unique challenges. In particular, it is very difficult for the higher organizational levels to effectively manage and motivate the local club and their officers. There are almost 16,000 clubs throughout the world, with an average of 22 members. But clubs often implode or wither if they cannot attract good officers, or if those officers are not sufficiently motivated.
The TM District administrators employ a variety of methods to motivate and organize the club officers. One technique, developed over the last couple of years in California's District 57, is an incentive program. This is a simple idea where clubs that perform specific actions, such as holding Open Houses, or renewing their memberships on time, receive modest monetary rewards that can be used to fund activities to help the club grow, such as pizza parties or projector equipment for hybrid meetings. This technique has become quite popular and effective. In the last year, District 57 has made more than 400 awards, totaling more than $10,000.
However, in the early days of the incentive program, it was a serious burden to administer. Each award request required a set of supporting documentation to be reviewed by the admins. Often there would need to be several rounds of email, if the officer did not submit the right documentation initially. It was also very hard to keep track of the award balances. Officers would have to email the admins to ask how much money they had in their award account. Many award requests fell through the cracks, and club officers were often upset to hear that their reimbursement was denied because they had overspent their award money.
Several members of the WWIO team are veteran Toastmasters, and one - Bett Bollhoefer - had previous experience as a District leader. Bett realized that a simple WebWidgets application could significantly ease the pain of administering the incentive program. The WWIO team got to work and built an early version of the system, and showed it to the District 57 admins. They loved it, and were thrilled at the prospect of simplifying their workload.
The Incentive Tracker app provides a variety of workflows. Club officers can log into the system and submit their award requests, uploading any required documentation, and also view their account balance. When a submission is made, the admins receive an email alert, and can log into the system and to review the request. The admins can also view the award balances for each club, allowing them to make sure the club does not overspend its funds.
The core of the Incentive Tracker is the basic award review process. But there are some important additional advantages of the system.
One key benefit is that it provides a kind of institutional memory about the incentive program. Every year, the District leaders change roles; some step down to make room for new people, while others move into new positions. This rotation makes it hard for the admins to remember details about how the incentive program functions, and which types of incentives work the best. But the WWIO app can be used to help remember historical details about the program. The new year's leadership has a simple option to copy the previous year's incentives, and then can tweak them as desired. This is much less work, and much more likely to succeed, than creating a fresh new set of incentives.
Another benefit is that the app can produced detailed statistical information about how much money is moving through the program, at what time, and through which incentive. Sometimes admins are surprised to learn that a particular incentive did (or did not) produce a lot of submissions. Admins can also see which incentives have a lot of Rejected submissions - this is often a sign that the requirements are too difficult for the club officers to fulfill.