Swindon Speakers Club is starting its new Season on Thursday 7th September 2017 at 7.30pm at Blunsdon House Hotel. It has a new club President and he is someone The Swindonian has interviewed before. Carl Rosier-Jones (author of The Caveman Principles) is taking on the role and is keen to promote the club and let people know what they do.
From their website, www.swindonspeakers.co.uk, Swindon Speakers Club started in 1982 and is now celebrating its 35 years anniversary. It is part of The Association of Speakers Clubs (ASC) and it follows a recognised speaker training programme whilst enjoying a great social group of fellow members.
We asked the new president some questions about his role and the club. We wanted to know why people would want to go to the club and what does a president do?
Some people are expected to give presentations at work, or have been asked to give a talk at social gatherings or even wants to better themselves for an upcoming job interview and they don’t know clubs like ours are there to help. People can feel intimidated or feel overwhelmed about these types of situations, Swindon Speakers allows members to practice at their own pace in a helpful and social group. We offer a free training programme and the support within the club is second to none.
My job as the club President is to make sure that the club continues to grow and that we provide first class entertainment, great evenings and continued training for all our members. My aim this year is to push our Speaker Bureau.
We were intrigued in this Speaker Bureau (http://www.swindonspeakers.co.uk/new/book-a-speaker/) so we asked what that was about.
We have some fantastic speakers in our club and we want to help develop their speaker skills, allowing them to grow beyond our club, so this was why we started a Speaker Bureau. We have already been asked to provide an MC/Compere for a black tie charity dinner event on 7th October to help raise funds for their appeal and auction.
We can provide willing high calibre, trained speakers in and around Swindon, for use in business meetings, events, gala’s, school assemblies and awards ceremonies. We would welcome anyone interested in booking a speaker to contact us for details.
All this sounds great but is it going to cost a lot?
We offer potential new members 2 free sessions to make sure they enjoy our group and what we do, then we will ask for a payment. We want to make sure that we offer good value for money whilst providing a great evening full of fun and high level training. Once the 2 free sessions have been used, our only expectation is a one off £40 annual membership.
We meet twice a month on the 1st and 3rd Thursday of every month, with the occasional social gatherings outside of the club environment. All of our meeting dates are on the first page of our website. We run several speaker competitions a year as well, welcoming all our members to join in and take part. Our club winners are then invited to go to regional competitions and if they win at these, on to National competitions which are all ran and supported by our national body The ASC.
When you say there is training involved what does that entail?
We subscribe to the ASC speaker manual, the manual takes a novice speaker from a simple stand up and speak (we call this their Ice breaker or A1) then they add new skills as they try each new section, until they get to their Showpiece (A10). As we assess throughout our members training, we are able to give recognised qualification certificates, direct from the ASC at their A5 and A10 stages.
We are not all about the speaker manual. We do a lot of impromptu speaking as well, which we call ‘topics.’ Everyone loves these sessions, where the topics chair picks a topic for the session, for example ‘what to use from the garage.’ The chair then invites people to stand up for 3 minutes and gives them a word about an item they found in the garage – such as a ‘bicycle pump.’ Members then talk about that item. Everyone loves to listen and there are some amazing speakers who can get up and have the whole room in hysterics.
That all sounds great. What else would you like potential members to know about the club?
We are a group of people who want to make our evenings as fun and enjoyable as possible. Last year we started to bring a video camera into the meetings and offered recordings of speeches, for our members to watch their own performance back. We have seen peoples self-critique of their performance and then making huge improvements the next time they stand up. We also have a Youtube channel and post videos of people’s performances (as well as our dedicated training sessions) on to our own website. We also offer training in WordPress posts and allow all our members to start blogging on our website.
How can people get in contact with the club and where else can they find out about the club?
We would love to welcome new members at the club, if anyone would like to come along on the 7th September, a quick email to our club secretary (secretary@swindonspeakers.co.uk) would help us identify any new members and to make sure we can give them a great welcome. We also have a contact form on our website – http://www.swindonspeakers.co.uk/new/contact-us/
We are on Social media, https://www.facebook.com/SwindonSpeakersClub/ and https://twitter.com/ASCSwindonSpeak and try hard to promote our club and members as much as we can.
It sounds like Swindon Speakers are a well-established club and the Blunsdon House Hotel is a beautiful location, where the hold their meetings. We have met the club president, Carl Rosier-Jones a number of times before, completing a review of his book and following his exploits of putting on his own stage show, ‘An evening with the Caveman’ earlier this year. In our opinion it sounds like the club has heritage, experience and a great reputation that any inspired new or old speaker, would want to join. We might even have to come along and try out a free session as well.
