The annual Toastmaster speech contests once more are on the horizon. The first two to be held every year are the International Speech Contest and the Evaluation Speech Contest.
I'd like to address the Evaluation Contest here. The way this is supposed to run is that a club has in a "Target Speaker" for contestants to evaluate. The target speaker should be someone that the club is not very familiar with. After all, if you're competing and evaluating someone you've seen time and time again, you already have some idea of what his/her capabilities are and therefore your opinion is somewhat formed already. Additionally, if a newer member is competing, that member might not have that familiarity with the speaker and would therefore be at a disadvantage... definitely not fair. Thus the custom of having someone from outside the club deliver that speech.
I've often wondered why there was no structure for clubs to group together to provide target speakers for each other. There could be a web site that people could sign up on (or even a "Google Doc" that someone could maintain based on contacts received) to record those volunteering to be target speakers. The basic premise would be a "speaker swap"... I help your club and you help my club. However, instances could arise from where more than one person from a club volunteers, or where the receiving club has no one who volunteers. Even so, that wouldn't mean a club couldn't accept someone as a volunteer, nor that a someone couldn't/shouldn't agree to be a target speaker. Instead, the situation is such that clubs seeking target speakers must contact other clubs to solicit such. Often times (in my experience) these contacts... usually by email... are never even acknowledged, let alone acted upon.
The results of being a target speaker benefit both the speaker and the club where the speech is performed. None could deny that "Stage time. stage time, stage time" would be increased, giving the speaker more experience. The benefits of evaluations from people outside the home club would be great as well (fresh ideas and opinions). The club members that do the evaluations would have the benefit as well, by seeing someone new and different. Even those club members that don't compete would benefit because they would get to see and learn from someone new and different. This is a "win-win" situation.
Why isn't this done? I just don't know.
Also, here's an interesting newspaper article (however, I don't know how long it will stay up on the web:
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