First-Time Convener of a District Conference | Michelle Priem, Stanthorpe, Australia, Ep 31

Would you be brave enough to take on the role of Convenor for a Toastmasters District level Conference? What about if you’d never even organised a club level contest, let alone Area or Division? How about it also required enticing a whole district to drive 2.5 hours from the nearest major centre, and much further for many others? Finally, would you ask your 12 year old son to open the Conference and would your son be brave enough to not only take on the task, but embrace it with enthusiasm? This episode's Toastmasters World Tour guest, Michelle Priem and her son Charlie, not only took on all that, but were highly successful and did it in style. Tune in to today's podcast to find out how she did it, and what lessons can be learnt. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

It was one of the final decisions, it was a suggestion to use my son Charlie to do the opening address of the of the conference. And I think that was very well received, and it was a lovely experience to see him go through that process of planning what he was going to say and then present it to a room, room full of people at 12 years old.

SPEAKER_01 0:31

Hi, my name's Brendan O'Sullivan, a Toastmaster from Brisbane, Australia. Welcome to my Toastmasters World Tour podcast. Please join me as I travel virtually around the world and chat to Toastmasters from different countries and all walks of life. Let's explore. I chat to Michelle Preem, who recently was the convener for our district conference. Let's find out what it took to organise a district conference and what lessons we can learn from it. Hi Michelle, welcome to the show. Hi Brandon. Recently you were the convener of the District 69 Conference in Stanthorpe. So first of all, congratulations on a beautifully run conference. Oh thank you very much. When you were a little girl and adults asked you what you wanted to be when you grew up, did you respond, When I grew up, I want to be convener of the District 69 conference in Stanthorpe?

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Um definitely not. I don't think I would have even known what Toastmasters was when I was a kid.

SPEAKER_01 2:11

So how did it come about then?

SPEAKER_00 2:14

I went to my first conference in when it was in Calandra in 24 and had a great time. And I guess that was my first introduction to the wider community of Toastmasters outside of the club that I was attending. I've moved clubs because our family moved out to Stanthorpe three and a half years ago, and I joined Stanthorpe Toastmasters after being part of a club in Brisbane as a way of meeting people. So when I sort of got word that it was coming to Stanthorpe, I wanted to put my hand up to be involved because that sort of brought two things that I really, really enjoy and love together, where we live and Stanthorpe, and Toastmasters and sharing it with the wider community.

SPEAKER_01 2:51

Okay, so you weren't really part of the decision of it coming to Stanthorpe then. How did that decision that Stanthorpe would be the club hosting it come about?

SPEAKER_00 3:00

Well, each year a different division is responsible for hosting the conference. And this was Western Division's turn. And then I think the um Nikki might have had the idea that Stanthorpe is part of Western Division and Stanthorpe would make a great location. So it was decided before I got on board that Stanthorpe was going to be the host town for the 2026 conference.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

And then when you heard about it, you said I'm going to be convener, or how did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 3:28

No, I think I contacted Nikki and originally my offer was just to be their girl on the ground to sort of suss out venues and suss out things that they needed for the conference and just I wanted to be involved in some way. And then Nikki and Alex got me on the phone and sort of said, Well, would you like to be the convener of the whole thing? And I was a little bit hesitant, but I also have a bit of a, I don't know if you call it a philosophy or just a bad habit of saying yes to opportunities that come along and just seeing where they take me and where I end up at them. So while I was a little bit, I'm not sure what I'm getting myself in for, um, definitely said yes and ended up being a really, really good experience that I yeah, couldn't have asked for more out of it.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

I love that spirit. Well done. And so you enjoyed the process then?

SPEAKER_00 4:12

Yes. It took a little while to get going. I think it took me a little while to understand what my role as convener was when we started getting people together online and finding people that suited the roles we needed to fill. And once we had a group of together, and I remember having a chat to somebody else on the committee who had been a convener before who just said, you've just got to take control, you just do it, don't wait for permission. And then I guess we really started to get the ball rolling with making decisions and planning all the little bits and pieces that have to come together to make the conference work.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

What was the most challenging part of the planning?

SPEAKER_00 4:48

I think because I'd only ever been to one conference, understanding what everyone's different roles were and what was needed to come together. Like I completely understood and was all over which venues in Stanthorpe I thought would be great and what elements of Stanthorpe we wanted to share as a community with everyone coming to visit. I think I learnt an awful lot about the contests and what's involved in that. Also learnt an awful lot about how the committee process works and you know bringing out other people's best skills they had to offer to contribute.

SPEAKER_01 5:20

Had you organized any other Toastmasters conferences before?

SPEAKER_00 5:24

No, I still haven't even been responsible for organising a contest within my own club. Uh so this was a huge year of learning for me. I was president of Stan Thought Toastmasters this year, and that had its own learnings that went with it, and just took on the convener because I was in the area and I was very, very keen to share the area with Toastmasters and um have a different experience.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

That's amazing. For our listeners, just to clarify, there's different levels in Toastmasters. There's the club level, the area level, the division level, and then the district level is the highest level within your region, your country before the highest level, the international level, the international conference. So it's the highest level in Australia, basically. And Michelle's gone straight into that, so that's really amazing. Okay, so you've gone straight to becoming the convener of the district level conference. How long have you been a Toastmaster for, Michelle?

SPEAKER_00 6:20

Um, I first joined Toastmasters in 2019. So is that seven years.

SPEAKER_01 6:27

Okay. Wonderful. And so having gone through the process of organizing the conference, would you have any advice for anyone contemplating being a convener of a district level conference or even the lower level conferences from what you've learned on how to put a conference together?

SPEAKER_00 6:45

I think the first thing is you just have to definitely back yourself. If you've got the idea that it's something you'd like to experience, then definitely take the opportunity on. And then I guess the second thing is making sure that you have a team to assist and help with. Organizing the conference and being convener is definitely not a one-person job. And this conference would nowhere have been anywhere near as successful if we didn't have the great team that we had behind it. So I think you've got to be open to taking advice from people that have been in the role before. So learning from past conferences, and that's both successes and challenges. And we had a we had a team that worked exceptionally well together, listened to other people's ideas, got things done quite quickly and efficiently. And we also had a past convener on our committee, which was Kate Norris, who organized the Calendra conference, and she was a great mentor and a wealth of experience to share in making some of the decisions or reminding us of things we might have forgotten to do.

SPEAKER_01 7:58

So how many people were on your team altogether?

SPEAKER_00 8:01

Um one, two at least eight.

SPEAKER_01 8:07

Okay. How many of them were from your Stanthorpe Club and how many were from outside?

SPEAKER_00 8:12

Oh, there was me plus two others for the Stanthorpe Club. We did contemplate the idea of hosting the conference as a club, and it was just decided that that probably wouldn't suit our club and where we were at as a club at the time. But there were definitely people within the club that were interested in taking on different roles and getting involved. And because all the meetings were done on Zoom, it was very easy to then include people that weren't necessarily Stanthorpe based, were just Toastmasters who were interested in taking on a role.

SPEAKER_01 8:40

The conference was at the start of May. When were you appointed as convener? And so how long was the planning process?

SPEAKER_00 8:48

In terms of Toastmasters conferences, we put Stanthorpe together in quite a short amount of time. I think the conversations I had with Nikki and Alex were in about October last year. And we didn't start having our committee meetings until December. So we managed to put the whole conference together in six months. Which we're very, very lucky it came off the way it did, and it's a testament to how well the team worked together to pull that together. I know the 2027 conference they started planning even before the 2026 conference had closed.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

So over a year, basically.

SPEAKER_00 9:27

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:29

Okay, so it's taken you uh about six months roughly to organise it. How often were the Zoom meetings?

SPEAKER_00 9:36

We started off monthly, um, then we got to be fortnightly, and then closer to the event we were meeting every week.

SPEAKER_01 9:43

And how long would they go for?

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half, depending on how much we had to discuss. Kate Norris was invaluable in keeping us all on track. She had a spreadsheet tracking planning system. I'm sure that was very easy to follow. And instead of having your traditional agendas and and then minutes and things like that, it was easy to see what the actions needed to be taken were, having deadlines for when they had to be made, and then who was responsible for them. So our meetings we would just work through all the tasks that needed to be completed, make decisions for the ones that needed to be decided upon, and then action them and report back the following meeting.

SPEAKER_01 10:21

There were eight people on your committee. How many people did you know beforehand before you signed up as a convener?

SPEAKER_00 10:28

No, I was two from my own club, obviously. Um Thomas and Kate were from my club in Brisbane. Marty, who did an excellent job of all the PR and promotions and graphic design, as well as ended up being OMC. So there you go, that's that's at least five of them. And I think a number of others I had met along the way, because we had the Western Division director, um, Mac Lacloud, and his wife Linda. So I had met them before, didn't I definitely got to know them better through the process. I think there was really only one or two that I was introduced to through the through the committee process, and that was Sue who did all the all the ticket sales and managing Eventbrite, which did a great job of that. And then of course Nikki and Alex, I had never really met before having conversations about wanting to help with the conference either. So they were another two that I got to know.

SPEAKER_01 11:17

In the organization side of things, is there anything that you either thought was a mistake or that you would do differently if you had your time again?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Uh probably step up and take control of it a little more earlier. I think I was sort of waiting, I thought was sort of waiting to be led by the more experienced people and realize that sort of realise a little bit further into the process that no, that was part of my job was to was to lead the meetings and take take a strong lead on decisions and things to be done and speak up with the ideas that I had. Because in the end, all the ideas I shared of oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could do are things that turned out really well. And the same for other people bringing ideas to the table. I think it's being really open to listening to other people's suggestions, um, as well as having, I guess, the guts to back your own suggestions as well, to bring those to the committee, regardless of who's in the room or who's the most experienced. It's about creatively sharing your own ideas and listening to other ideas and then deciding what's going to work best for what we're trying to achieve.

SPEAKER_01 12:16

Which ideas of yours were you most happy with?

SPEAKER_00 12:20

You love it. It was the wine glass that everyone got to take home.

SPEAKER_01 12:25

Yeah, that was popular, that was for sure. But it was a very on theme.

SPEAKER_00 12:29

I just thought it was a very fitting token of the weekend coming to Stanthorpe. Yes. Um I guess that sort of part was you know, that well, you know, I liked that. It was a bit different from other conferences, so I've heard. Um, and then I guess the last the last sort of it was one of the final decisions was a suggestion to use my son Charlie to do the opening address at the of the conference. And I think that was very well received and it was a lovely experience to see him go through that process of planning what he was gonna say and then present it to a room, room full of people at 12 years old.

SPEAKER_01 13:02

I was gonna bring that up that Charlie spoke in the opening of the conference. How did that come about?

SPEAKER_00 13:08

I was just thinking of different ways to open it because we were already having a council member speak at the Friday night get together. Um, you know, you know, Nikki was gonna be speaking at different times. We had Monique, the international director, there, and sort of wanted to open it in a bit of a unique way to catch people's attention. Wasn't a completely original idea, Mac McLeod, who planned the division conference for the Western Division. He had the school captain of Dolby State School opened that, and I sort of listened to him speak, and I think it's always catches everyone's attention when you've got a younger person who's got the confidence to speak in front of a group. 100%. And as all that sort of flowed in, I thought, Oh, I wonder if wonder how one I one I can get my family involved in this thing that's taken so much time um and also catch everyone's attention and and just open it up in a really nice give it a bit of a a real Stan Thought community feel to it.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

So you put it to your son Charlie, how did you put it to him and how did he receive the invitation?

SPEAKER_00 14:05

Uh he was very excited. I just asked him one day how he would feel about being the to represent his school and um open the conference and he asked me what that meant, what he'd have to do, and so I explained get up on the stage in front of about 120 people and welcome them to Stanthorpe, welcome them to the end conference and wish everyone luck for the contest. And then he was really excited and he was off writing his ideas down, and we have a bit of a process when he's got to deliver a speech, he'll sort of put his ideas together and I'll help him organise them. And then he took it to school, and his whole class and his teacher really got behind him, and he was practicing in s at class, and they were giving him suggestions about gestures and where to use vocal variety to, you know, make his jokes and put humour into it. So I think by the the end of the week, right before the conference, he'd had a lot of support at school and it almost become a whole class encouragement and project for him to do.

SPEAKER_01 14:58

As part of the audience, for me, that was one of the real highlights of the whole conference. And I think one of the key words you just said was enthusiasm. Because not only was it yeah, like a young person getting up, and you know, here we are as adults, sometimes struggling to do public speaking, and then you get a young 12-year-old get up and do such a good job of it, but also brimming with enthusiasm, and that you know, there's that transference. If the person speaking is enthusiastic, then that catches our attention and there's a bit of transference. We feel enthusiastic then as well for the whole thing. So I thought that was the stroke of genius.

SPEAKER_00 15:32

Yes. Well, Charlie loved the opportunity. He loves those opportunities to be able to represent his school and do something a little bit different, and that definitely fit the bill for him.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

What a wonderful thing to do. Yeah, he clearly was enjoying it. Who got the idea and how did you manage to get the Professor Roley Sussex, the Australian linguist, to come along and do a keynote speech?

SPEAKER_00 15:55

That was a big uh committee discussion where people were talking about well, who are we getting for our keynote speakers? But Roley Sussex has spoken before at a Western Division conference, I believe. Or it might have been at another district conference held by Western Division. And so John Bushel was contacted, and he was part of the committee as well. He had the contacts from last time Roley Sussex was involved with Toastmasters and was able to reach out and make the invitation. And I think because he had such a great experience last time, he was more than happy to come along and be our keynote address again.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

That was also a fabulous element. And then you had the Region 12 director also come and give a keynote speech.

SPEAKER_00 16:36

Yes. That one was about a bit of a she has to complete certain tasks as international director. And coming to the conference and being able to speak was part of that, so it sort of worked beautifully for us because that filled our other keynote position. And I think she did a a really nice job too.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

Yeah, Monique was great. So what you're saying, it was a win-win in that situation.

SPEAKER_00 16:59

That part of it was very easy to sort of do it just naturally came together.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

I think the weekend went beautifully. Was there anything that you wish had gone differently than it did?

SPEAKER_00 17:12

Not overall. I think a big learning for me was how much was involved in the actual contest part of it. Uh the contest is contests are not organised by the committee. That was the the trio contribution part of it. And I think if we could go back and do that again, I think we had missed a couple of people being assigned to roles like micing people up and managing the audio system that was there at various. But I think we were very lucky to be part of the Toastmasters community because those roles got filled by people who were attending the conference and we knew they had skills, they were asked, Would you mind doing this for the weekend? I just think if I could go back and do that again, it would probably be a a role that we would have had assigned to people. So not so much a big challenge because it's a great Toastmasters community and people will always step in and take on things. But I think that part of it might have been done a bit better.

SPEAKER_01 18:05

Sure. I had a small role selling raffle tickets, and one of the prizes in the raffle was you have a fabulous accommodation called Stargazers out there. And I thought if I'm gonna be part of the raffle, maybe I should go and have a look. And I went out there at night on the Friday night, and I thought, oh my goodness, what an idyllic spot this is. Absolutely beautiful. In the dark. Oh, well, the night sky was the star, well, fitting to the name that the night sky was absolutely beautiful. And some rabbits ran across in front of my headlights of my car. And I thought, I thought, oh, this is so peaceful out here. And being early May, just after Easter, I thought this must be where the Easter bunny comes to after he's after he's done his world tour to relax.

SPEAKER_00 18:52

The rabbits are a bit of a pest, but yes, it is very quiet. We were very, very fortunate that when we moved to Brisbane, we landed here. We've got 38 acres, including two cottages that we call Stargazers Escape as accommodation. And only five kilometres from town, but we at the end of a road, so we feel like you're in the middle of nowhere. It's very quiet, very peaceful.

SPEAKER_01 19:11

The serenity. How's the serenity? Like the castle, the Aussie movie The Castle, how's the serenity?

SPEAKER_00 19:17

Yeah, there's plenty of that here. Um, so much so I don't think I'd ever move back to Brisbane.

SPEAKER_01 19:22

Fair enough. I can understand that. Coinciding with the conference, you also started your first tour of your tour business. How did that go?

SPEAKER_00 19:31

Well, that was a great day out, and I guess this comes back to I mentioned a you know, a trait of mine or a bad habit of jumping in and taking on opportunities and seeing what I can make of them. So, yes, that was the launch weekend of Premium Stanthorpe Tours. And I can tell you now I've been um we're doing very, very well. We're out two or three times a week, sometimes with multiple cars on the same day, um, showing people granite belts and taking them to wineries and all the best that we've got to offer up here and having a great time while doing it.

SPEAKER_01 20:01

It's a beautiful part of the country. Is it all Toastmasters that are coming to visit?

SPEAKER_00 20:06

No, not all Toastmasters. I've run into a couple of Toastmasters up here since the conference. We had all Toastmasters on our launch tour on the Monday. We have 11 people that signed up to do that with us, which was good fun. And a great way, for me, it was a great way to finish the conference because it was the pressure was off. It was just out having a nice day out visiting some of the wineries around the place. And then since then it we've gone really, really well.

SPEAKER_01 20:30

You know, I think it's a credit to you that Stanthorpe is like a good two and a half hour drive from Brisbane, and yet there was such a good turnout and such enthusiasm and such high-profile people. It was fabulous. I know Marty was brimming with enthusiasm, not just for the conference, but for Stargazers and the wine tour.

SPEAKER_00 20:50

Yes. Marty has been a bit of a regular visit here, visitor. Um he loved the region long before he found Stargazers. He happened to win the Raffle Prize at a Calandric conference. Um, and he and his wife Michelle came down to stay. Yes, he loves the region and especially loves his wine and his Larry suits. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 21:14

Is there any other advice you'd have for people organizing conferences?

SPEAKER_00 21:19

I think the best advice I could give to anyone else doing it is to have a really good team around you and then on the actual weekend relax and enjoy the experience.

SPEAKER_01 21:28

Well done on a fabulously organised district conference, Michelle, and thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's been an absolute pleasure and an honour.

SPEAKER_00 21:36

Thank you.

SPEAKER_01 21:43

Thanks for listening to today's show. One of the key elements of Toastmasters is evaluations. This is how we grow and improve, both by encouraging comments for things we've got right and points for improvement. We all learn and benefit from these evaluations, not just the person being evaluated. So any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. If you have a Toastmasters story you'd like to share, or would like to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastmasters World Tour at gmail.com. Thanks for listening.