Using Google Docs to become an Effective Toastmaster

Have you ever wondered whether there's a better, more efficient and effective way to manage our Toastmasters content?

Exactly 3 months back, I asked this question to myself and put forth the problem statement like this - "I want to access all my Toastmasters files from any location and any computer, so that I never lose a thought"? As soon as I posed this question, the answer was obvious - Internet. Internet is everywhere. I said "If I could put all my Toastmasters files online, then my problem is solved. Even better, if I could directly create, edit and store my files online, then I would be as free as a bird." To find my answer, I turned to my most trusted companion - Google. Within a few minutes, I found the magic wand that I was looking for - Google Docs.

My first impression was that it was nothing more than an online Notepad. But I decided to give it a fair chance to prove itself, and it did not disappoint me. Gradually, I found myself accumulating material like jokes, quotes, short inspirational stories, table topics, etc. Not only was I working on my next project speech, I started drafting ideas for my next 3-4 project speeches. To my own surprise, within 2 months, I had built up a library of 50+ documents. Slowly but surely, Google Docs was growing on me.

Simplicity & Performance was what I was sold to. It is simple, fast, responsive and let's you concentrate on your thoughts, rather than the bells and whistles of the tool. It gives you all the common MS-Word like features and some that even MS-Word does not provide.

You can import / export document to and from multiple formats like MS Office, Open Office and PDF.

It has an extremely powerful revision history tool. As you can see it has recorded nearly 400 revisions of my document.

Online sharing of documents. Imagine that you have drafted your speech and want to have it reviewed by your mentor. Forget about email attachments. You can now share the document online with your mentor.

You can even publish your speeches on the internet so that anybody, including your club members, can read them online. What's more, you can directly publish your documents to your blog.

Once you draft your speech, you can run a word count on your speech. From my experience, I found that my speed is about 100 words per min. So, if I have 7 mins for my speech, I should keep my speech around 700 words.

How do you tell whether your speech would be easily understood by your audience. Google docs provides you a readability score, which is based on a test used in the US to prepare academic content. It uses a scale of 0 to 100. The lower the score, the more difficult it is to understand. A text with a readability score of 65 is easily understandable by an average 8th grade student. So, as Toastmasters if we can keep the readability of our speech to around 65, we have a good chance of putting our message across to listeners successfully.

One of the very powerful features of Google Docs is Forms. You can use Google Forms for creating quick surveys. These surveys can be directly embedded in an email and sent to the club members. You can use the surveys for various purposes such as:

1. Collecting feedback from members.
2. Checking member availability for club events.
3. Booking appointments for meeting / event roles

The possibilities of using spreadsheet to conduct club business are endless. These are some of the purposes that my club has employed Google Spreadsheets for:

1. Manage members' education progress (Vice President Education)
2. Manage members and guest list (Vice President Membership)
3. Manage club finances (Club Treasurer)
4. Manage club asset inventory (Sergeant-at-Arms, Secretary)

Toastmasters is not just about Public Speaking and Communication, it's also about developing your Leadership skills. Constant self-improvement and effective personal organization are traits of good leaders.

As technology evolves, trick is to tame it and use it to our advantage. Google Docs is one tool that can really help you bring about improvement in your process of management of Toastmasters content, and make you a more effective Toastmaster, overall.

Just a word of caution - Online Data Security is always a matter of concern when storing personal content online. So, I advice not to store any sensitive / confidential personal or work related content online.