Turn your club website into a recruiting machine

Here is how Club Awesome Toastmasters in Coral Springs, Florida, uses its website to register guests and convert them into members.

If you find this information valuable, consider giving a "like" or comment to the versions posted to LinkedIn and the Facebook TI members group.

For background, Club Awesome has had components of this solution for years but has been optimizing them recently -- the "personal touch" parts, not just the digital tools -- to create a smoothly operating machine.

For example, the RSVPMaker plugin we use for guest event registration sends an automatic confirmation email -- good for making sure the prospective guest and potential member gets an immediate response with the essential details -- but our VP of Membership's personal emails to everyone who registers have made an even bigger difference. Online Presenters Toastmasters follows the same basic process.

The web-based member application, combined with easy online payments is one of the most powerful tools we have for reducing friction in the process of converting a visitor to a member.

Club Awesome was the birthplace of the Toastmost WordPress for Toastmasters system for club marketing and operations.

I'm proud of many aspects of the agenda management system, but the real power of WordPress lies in its capabilities as a professional digital marketing platform. Any online businessperson will tell you web visits are great, but conversion of visitors into buyers, subscribers, or in our case members is what really matters. I'm preaching that this is how you turn your website into a conversion machine.

If you're using Toastmost but not using these tools, you may be leaving money on the table.