It’s showtime: tips for staging great club meetings

Many of the best tips for conducting fun, relevant meetings come from clubs already walking the walk and talking the talk. Here are a few things to keep in mind to make your meetings the best they can be.

• “Why are the best meetings in Ridgetown, Ontario? Diversity, new ideas, old values, some treasured traditions, inclusiveness, great planning, spontaneity, flexibility, and surprises—all with huge doses of fun,” says Barbara Doxtater.
• “For clubs to improve the quality of their meetings, the very best way to start is by inter-clubbing with clubs that run higher-quality meetings,” suggests Harry A. Dingwall of the Kiwanis Club of Issaquah, Washington
• “Whether it is a local doctor, a performer, a community activist, or a trivia night, Kiwanians recognize that our speakers’ messages are about them and for them,” says Stratford, Ontario, Kiwanis club public relations director Pam Dawes. “Relevance is an important part of ensuring attendance success. If members and their partners fail to see the relevance, they will be less interested in meetings and look for other avenues to continue their community service.”
• The Koszalin, Poland, Kiwanis club sets aside a meeting for sponsors and potential sponsors of the club’s projects.

“One time a year we prepare a special club meeting with a dinner and live music,” 2005-06 president Gazyna “Kate” Psiuch says. “We invite sponsors or people who will be sponsors of our club in the future. We present the members of the club and the projects we have done. We show guests our memorial book and photos about the life of the club. We discuss a lot about our future plans—especially what we want to realize in the near future.”

This meeting, which serves not only as a way to showcase the work the club is doing but also as a membership-recruitment opportunity, serves another purpose as well.

“Partners and sponsors who support us in our projects are really glad with these meetings,” Kate says. “They are glad they can see how we spend their money.”

• “The Kiwanis Club of Elmira stages six socials per year,” says Elmira Kiwanian Jim Stewart. “Our socials all involve our spouses and partners—the often tireless supporters and help at many of our projects. Three of the socials have a fixed theme … while the other three vary in content. We have had some very interesting evenings. We had a bus tour of the local Mennonite community, followed by a dinner at a small country restaurant. It was very educational to learn about the differences in the Mennonite/Amish communities.”

• The St. Marys Kiwanis club in Georgia extends a warm welcome to members of all sponsored leadership program members, their families, teachers, principals, and others at several meetings during the year. This honors all sponsored leadership program officers while presenting opportunities to invite parents to consider Kiwanis membership.

• “Occasionally, we play a game with the guest speaker to make the topic more interesting,” says Heidi Olivia Tan, a member of the Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Kiwanis club. “For example, president Chandrika Menon wanted to do a Kiwanis orientation with a difference. Instead of having a straight presentation, she asked vice-president Godfrey Rajalingam (who is a radio and function presenter by profession) to interview past Malaysia District governor Lee Kuan Yong about his Kiwanis experience. Halfway through the interview, members were invited to suggest a word the speaker had to insert in every sentence of his answer, such as ‘umbrella,’ or ‘duck.’ This kept the members in stitches, and the message went down very well.”

• While the Kiwanis Club of San Leandro, California, favors a traditional meeting, members take turns as speaker chairman each month, resulting in a variety of speakers and topics. This also has potential as a membership recruitment tool because each member who sets up a program tends to bring a few friends (potential members) to the meeting.

• “The Sheriff” spices things up during meetings of the Kiwanis Club of Shepherd Park in Washington, DC. Any member who arrives late, has a cell phone ring, or talks during the meeting is fined a quarter, which the sheriff happily collects in a small saucepan.

• The sillier, the better for members of the Kiwanis Club of Fox Cities, Wisconsin. Despite having meetings early on Friday mornings—7:15 am—members aren’t too sleepy to laugh. In fact, to keep the meetings fun, projects are promoted with “props.” For example, when the highway cleanup project was under way, the chairman donned a safety vest and offered free vests to members who made it to all five cleanups. There also was a contest to see who discovered the weirdest garbage.

• Members of the Kiwanis Club of Lancaster, Saint John, New Brunswick, know how important it is to tap into their own membership for meeting and project ideas. President Bill Kearns recently worked with his employer and another club member who is a registered nurse to set up a cholesterol clinic during a meeting. After members of the club were tested, each received a pedometer to record how many steps they take during the day. One of the club’s newest members, Jim Sullivan, is an avid jogger and challenged each member to record 10,000 steps per day. “Imagine, being a Kiwanian can make you a healthier person,” Bill says.

• You won’t find a jam session like this at most Kiwanis club meetings. While some clubs are happy just to have a piano player in their membership, the Minot, North Dakota, Kiwanis club has a six-piece band that has its own big band music stands. It has a pianist—but it also boasts a woodwind, trombone, trumpet, and tuba player. The group accompanies the club during singing.

• The Metropolitan Milwaukee Nights Kiwanis club takes advantage of meeting time to perform service projects. The Wisconsin club, which meets twice a month, devotes the second meeting to service at the Milwaukee Christian Coalition Center. While there, members volunteer with children, making them dinner, playing games, making crafts, and anything else that is needed or requested. A quick meeting is conducted right before volunteering, but there typically is no agenda. The club also conducts much of its business via e-mail and the Web site, to keep meeting time open to volunteering. “We have found this to be very rewarding for our members, as they really prefer hands-on volunteering to a typical meeting,” says Kristen Gillen.

Need more ideas?

For ideas on how to make club meetings more interesting, go to click here.