I had the opportunity to run my first contest in Toastmasters tonight. Fortunately, the Toastmasters organization has a very detailed rule book on what is involved to run a speech contest. They also provide some nice documents that need to be filled out by the contestants and the judges which were useful.

The following are some things that helped me during the contest:

1. I wrote down the title of the various eight or nine documents that were needed for the contest

2. Fortunately for the documents that are missing in the packet. I had, Toastmasters had up online to download in digital form.

3. I divided the different documents into separate folders for the judges, the timer, and the contestants.

4. The judges and adjustments came early, which gave them plenty of time to do the necessary paperwork to ensure that they were qualified for the separate tasks.

5. I had most everything organized into separate folders well in advance to the contest, so there was not as much of a rush job, just prior to the contest.

6. I had the opportunity to judge a contest for another club before I ran my own. This was useful to give me a good idea of what was expected to occur during the contest.

7. The additional advantage of helping another club in being a judge is that one of their members volunteered to help judge hours, which is nice.

Things that can be improved on:

1. I was going to bring a calculator in case any judges wanted to use it to add up their points, but couldn’t find it.

2. I printed up a list of different tasks that needed to be done throughout the contest and promptly left it here home.

3. I knew who the participants were for humorous speeches; I should have written up the participation certificates in advance.

4. I should’ve kept a list for myself of all the names of the participants in what order they were in. That way, I would not stumble over announcing the next contestant was going to be.

Overall, I think the contest worked out pretty well. I glanced over it was little bit stressful with my worry of making sure it worked out.

On a side note, I have a follow-up to the topic I touched on last week. We had three humorous speeches tonight. The first topic was Scooby Doo scuba diving, the second bad truck good car and the third about my father. There are some nice attributes about each of the speeches.

If you have run a contest of any type, please feel free to share some things you learned from your experience. Thank you.