The organization required for these competitions can be quite daunting to newer members but it’s very important that everything happens in accordance with the official rules. To help ensure that people know how to run a contest successfully there are training sessions held to help get them up to speed.

In the past, I’ve competed, judged, chaired and mentored speech contests so I’m fairly confident that I know my way around one, but I know that you can never know EVERYTHING, so last weekend I attended a speech contest training session run by District 21 Division B in Vancouver.

Despite having experienced many contests in the past and despite being very familiar with the contents of the official rulebook, I learnt LOTS. I took lots of notes and decided to pass them on in the hope that they might help someone else too.

This information isn’t a definitive guide on how to run a contest but it expands on the information in the Toastmasters Speech Contest Rulebook. You should probably be familiar with the rulebook in order to get the most out of these notes…

Why is it important to run a good contest? It’s important because the competitors have put time and effort into taking part, you owe it to them to ensure that your contest is FAIR and abides by the rules.

I was guest judge at a neighbouring club’s contest this week and noticed several things which didn’t go smoothly so I guess I can add a supplemental set of tips:

• Remember that if a contestant in the FIRST contest is also taking part in the SECOND contest then you shouldn’t interview them after the first contest. This is to prevent the judges for the second contest hearing anything that might sway their opinion
• Make sure that no competitors wear any badges or other indication of rank or awards
• If you’re using borrowed lights or anything else that isn’t your club’s usual equipment then make sure that everybody who will use this or be affected by it is given a full demonstration beforehand to ensure there are no slip-ups or misunderstandings
• Prepare your questions before the contestant interview – don’t be reading the bio on stage
• If you’re handing out participation certificates then do it when you interview the competitors. This saves you having to call them all up to the stage again later on

There were also plenty of things that went RIGHT, and I picked up some tips myself:

• If you’ve finished interviewing the contestants and the counters haven’t finished calculating the result yet then call up one of your visiting dignitaries to talk to the audience. If you’ve got an Area/Division/District Governor in attendance then everybody would love to hear from them and this way you don’t have to tag on extra time for that at the end of the contest
• I think it’s reasonably well understood that you only announce third place if you have five or more competitors in a contest. The reason for this is to ensure that there are at least two contestants whose names are not announced. This makes sure that nobody knows who came last. However what do you do if you only have three contestants? You need a second place because you need to have a reserve in case the winner can’t represent your club at the Area contest. But if you announce second place then everybody knows who came last. The answer is that you only announce first place and then you discretely present the second place contestant with their certificate after the meeting has ended. That way you have your second place backup but the audience don’t know who came last. (That tip came direct from our current District Governor, Tom Jones, who was in attendance)

I mentioned earlier “be sure you have plenty of copies of all the forms”. Here’s a quick checklist of the forms I think you need for a contest:

• contestant eligibility & originality form
• contestant bio form
• a sheet to record the speaking order for both contests
• humorous speech judging form
• table topics speech judging form
• tie-breaker judging forms for both contests
• timing record form
• counters record form
• notification of winner form

I’ve got one final tip that I put into our Club Contest agenda when I last ran a contest and has now spread down the road to our neighbours. When you’re giving a prepared speech in a contest and you’re NOT speaking first, you gain an advantage over the first speaker as you have one minute of silence before you take the stage in which to gather your thoughts. This is the one minute that the judges are using to write their scores for the preceding speaker. With nobody speaking before them, the first speaker doesn’t get this time. In order to balance things out and make everything as fair as possible I added one minute of silence to the agenda before the first speaker speaks – I think it’s a nice little touch.

As usual I ran over time – I’m yet to completely compensate for the way the speech expands in length from my practising at home to when I give it for real and 7 minutes just turns out to be far too short a time to convey much useful information. When the warning lights started to come on I made a decision to cut two paragraphs that I’d earlier marked as optional… and I still ran over.

But apart from the timing and a moment when I lost my thread and had to stare at my notes, it went very well. We were in a different room to our usual one and the noise levels were much higher – we had a busy swimming pool the other side of plate glass windows all the way down one side of the room. They helped force me to push myself and really project my voice – which was a good thing because it was a speech project about using your voice effectively!

I talked briefly about what goes into a good speech and how these are things that you should look for when evaluating. I also mentioned the things that are looked for in the Toastmasters speech evaluation contest – logically it makes sense to also think about those when doing an evaluation. But the focus of my speech was that speech evaluation is a personal thing. Everybody is affected differently by a speech and, given that three minutes isn’t enough time to talk about everything that the speaker did, I think it’s important to concentrate on the things that move YOU. For me personally, that’s the introduction. If you can’t grab the audience’s attention in the first thirty seconds of your speech then you’re sure as hell not going to have it by the middle of your speech. I also recommended that, after you’ve given your first couple of evaluations and found your “evaluation style”, type-up a crib sheet… something that provides a skeleton for you to hang your evaluation on… headings about things to look for, spaces marked out for things you know you’ll want to comment on, that sort of thing.

And then… my secret technique… when you’ve written all this stuff down during the speech, you have a mass of scribblings all out of order. Remember that an evaluation is like a mini speech in itself: it needs an introduction, a body with transitions between your points and a conclusion. So I write sequence numbers next to the things I want to talk about on my crib sheet. That way, when I’m standing up and speaking, my thoughts will flow in a coherent order.

The audience went wild *LOL*. I felt like a rock star – never had quite that many congratulations after a speech before!

This week I’m chairman… I have a good theme but I’m not feeling desperately enthused.

I’m seldom totally happy with my evaluations but last night I thought I really nailed it. And won Best Evaluator again! Not that I’m not very pleased to be recognized, but I do feel a bit sorry for the other evaluators sometimes. I’ve always found speech evaluation to be the most challenging thing we do at Toastmasters, when I first started I HATED it… basically you’re doing a 3 minute speech and you’ve only got about 20 minutes to prepare it. Everybody who steps up to do a speech evaluation has worked hard… and yet they seldom get the ribbon for it.

Well, it’s time for me to give something back. Next week I’m giving a speech and, given that everybody seems to think I’m good at speech evaluation, I’m going to give a speech on speech evaluation! See if I can pass on some of these tricks I apparently have