Full House

Open houses are one of the best tools to build club membership. A successful one draws guests and awareness, and ultimately results in new members for the club.

Last year, our club, London Victorians, in the United Kingdom, hosted a highly successful open house. We produced six marketing videos, generated 2,600 views on LinkedIn, and drew 49 guests. After the evening event, 11 guests signed up as new members.

How did we do it?

Here are the key lessons, which every club can replicate.

Make It a Paid Ticketed Event

London Victorians had organized an open house a year earlier, attended by around 35 people, including club members. It was a successful event that led to some new members joining the club; however, out of 41 guests registered to attend, only 10 had turned up.

This time, we decided to charge attendees 5 pounds ($6.50 USD) to ensure buy-in and commitment from them. In turn, we focused on producing an event that they would both enjoy and benefit from. The funds we collected would be used as club income, per Toastmasters policy.

A Big Event Needs a Big Team

All members of the club’s leadership team helped out to varying degrees. Nick Roberts, our Vice President Membership at the time, spearheaded organizing the open house, and Sam Yates, our then-Vice President Public Relations, and I, then-Club Treasurer, supported Nick. We knew early on that more club members would also need to be involved, especially on the day of the event.

We filled the meeting agenda with excellent speakers, strong evaluators, and a fabulous Toastmaster of the Day to create an engaging show. Another member handled hospitality, signing in, registering, and mingling with guests.

In total, almost 20 club members played a part in making this event successful. It was truly driven by the whole club.

Set Goals Up Front and Plan Accordingly

We started planning the event’s format seven weeks before the scheduled date. These were the key elements we settled on:

1. The theme would be public speaking essentials and tips, aimed at attendees looking to improve their skills in a professional yet friendly atmosphere.
2. We would hold a short, interactive 15-minute workshop about the essentials of public speaking (the Who, What, Why, How, and When questions to ask yourself before giving a speech) to kick off the event after introductions from the Club President and Toastmaster.
3. The agenda followed an open house planning document I wrote as District 91’s Club Growth Director, including audience-led interactive speaker evaluations facilitated by the Toastmaster.
4. We would ask a question for all attendees to answer while registering: “Tell us something unique, interesting, or fun about you.” Then our Table Topics^® session—with responses kept to one minute maximum—would be based on the most interesting answers, which would be pre-selected by the Table Topicsmaster.
5. To encourage people to join, we would wrap up the event with a club member sharing their Toastmasters journey.
6. After the event, we’d have networking over pizza.

The goal was to attract 80 people and fill all the seats in the meeting room.

Conduct a Big Marketing Push

Paid marketing was part of the project plan, and we created a series of one-minute marketing videos to entice people to attend. We knew we also needed to maximize use of the club’s social media channels.

Content Creation – Nick, Sam, and I worked together to create professional-looking content to share across all marketing channels. Using the best photos at our disposal, we created a poster, a square image for social media, and the marketing videos, which featured our members encouraging people to attend the open house. We used Canva to edit these materials and iPhones to shoot the videos in our meeting venue.

Internal Promotion – Nick spoke about the event to club members during every meeting the month before, and he sent multiple WhatsApp messages in our group with the event poster included. Several members invited friends and colleagues to attend, and word of mouth likely brought in more registrations as well.

Eventbrite Marketing – Eventbrite promotes events to users according to their own interests, and you can advertise directly on the platform to attract more views and registration. We continually updated our event page throughout the pre-event period to make it more attractive, ultimately using features such as video headers and embedded agendas. We ran £30 (about 40 USD) of paid advertising on Eventbrite the month before the scheduled event targeted at people living in London.

LinkedIn Posts – Nick took the lead in sharing posts about the event in his profile and the club’s profile, with members encouraged to reshare them. We also leveraged the videos we created into a campaign of five paid ads, which were viewed 2,600 times and brought in close to 100 visitors to our Eventbrite page.

Facebook Posts – We posted once or twice per week reminding people to attend the event, and we shared the images and videos we created. A short paid marketing campaign using an image also gathered 8,000 impressions and led to a spike in traffic to our Eventbrite page.

Past Guests and Newsletter – We promoted the event to all our past club members and guests via our newsletter, which led to a few familiar faces coming back to the club.

Business Networks – Nick reached out to the Victoria Business Improvement District and other similar networks in the area. Through grit and a few phone calls with the right people, he was able to get our event added to one of their websites and a promotional newsletter that went out to businesses in this part of London.

Making It Work

Executing this event properly was crucial and all meeting functionaries alongside the hospitality team were briefed beforehand regarding their tasks. Our Toastmaster for this meeting, Lucy Gray, made sure all contingencies were planned for so that nothing was left to chance.

In the end, everything went smoothly and QR codes were spread around the room encouraging attendees to join the club. Pizzas arrived on time, and everyone had something to eat.

Lucy Gray served as Toastmaster of the meeting for London Victorians' open house.

How Did We Do?

Out of 59 guests who registered to attend, 49 turned up, justifying the club’s decision to charge for attendance. What’s more, we had a whopping 11 new members sign up after attending the event, no doubt prompted by a special offer to waive the usual fee to join our club. Ticket sales covered all marketing costs, and some of the cost of the pizza. By all accounts this was an amazingly successful event made possible by a great team!

Thea Mallorie, one of the people who joined our club after the event, says, “The things that stood out to me were: one, the real warmth and friendliness of the group; everyone seemed to be interesting and have genuine friendships together. Second was the quality of the speeches.”

She adds that the two speakers addressed the topic of public-speaking nervousness, “and the contents of their speeches were inspiring and spoke to me personally.”

Future Success

As successful as the event was, these following lessons will help us do even better next time:

1. Plan ahead even more – In hindsight, locking everything in eight or even 10 weeks in advance would have given us a few weeks to shoot more marketing videos and create more content.
2. Read the fine print regarding videos – Our marketing videos were successful but could have had far more power if we could have used them on Facebook. For some reason, Facebook rejected them for advertising purposes, and we lacked the time to research this further and make any claim. YouTube only accepted our videos as shorts once the background music was removed, despite it being copyright-free.
3. Have a bigger team – We needed a fourth person on the organizing team, especially to support with marketing. There was a time a few weeks before the scheduled event when we all found ourselves stretched. Another team member could have helped with getting more content out.

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