Toastmasters – the nonprofit that supports those who fear public speaking – bravely embraces AI

On a recent evening, 19 people gathered after work at a public library in downtown Minneapolis for a meeting of Toastmasters International, the nonprofit that helps anyone who’s interested hone their public speaking skills.

Each had their motives.

One had an upcoming work seminar. One wanted to record a promotional video. Another had a wedding on the horizon.

Simon Lual, one of four speakers, was told he had good, natural hand gestures. Also that he seemed a bit rushed toward the end of his speech and said “right” a lot.

It was “really good” feedback, said the 24-year-old entrepreneur, adding: “I’m going to stop saying ‘right’ at the end of every sentence.”

Such in-person experiences are the hallmark of Toastmasters International, which celebrated 100 years last year. There’s eye contact, handshakes, applause.

Behind the scenes though, the nonprofit is going through a digital transformation, spurred by the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic — when membership fell as meetings went online — as well as the demands of an increasingly global enrollment.

While physical meetings are mostly back, that transformation continues, most recently with the roll-out of Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant, to help support an organization that now has more members outside the U.S. than in.

Fear of speaking

Fear of public speaking is so common it even has its own name: Glossophobia. Glossa is Greek for tongue and phobos means dread.

Since 1924, when the first Toastmasters club started in a basement of a YMCA in Santa Ana, the organization has spread across the U.S. and the world. Over the years, the basic formula has stayed the same: regular practice with a supportive live audience and structured feedback.

Members span society and include professionals, politicians, podcasters and yes, those with upcoming weddings. “It’s just such a useful skill,” says Devlin Shaughnessy, president of the Minneapolis Toastmasters Club.

Volunteers like Shaughnessy, whose day job is a house painter, run local clubs with help from headquarters in Denver. There, a staff of 150 supports the global network — collecting dues and donations, preparing educational materials, providing IT support and answering member questions. Maybe most prominently, they run the World Championship of Public Speaking each year, which culminates at the Toastmasters International Convention, attended by thousands.

The organization is facing challenges. Since about 2010, domestic membership has been falling, a fate shared by many fraternal organizations. International enrollment now makes up almost two-thirds of membership, fueled by rapid growth in places like India and China.

Covid-19, when people could not meet in person, hit the organization hard. Overall membership fell from a high of 367,000 in 2020 to 270,000 today.

As part of recovery efforts, the organization streamlined operations. Three years ago, Toastmasters signed an enterprise agreement to shift its digital operations onto Microsoft platforms.

For example, all its communications from chat to email to phone moved from four different platforms to Microsoft’s Omnichannel platform last year. “Our call center is more productive,” says Jess Harris, senior manager of IT support and services. “Everything’s kind of in one place. They’re not dealing with four different applications.”

Catering to the world

Also last year, the organization began exploring using Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI assistant for Microsoft 365 (formerly known as Microsoft Office).

So far, between 30 and 40 employees, or roughly 20-something percent of staff, have Copilot licenses. They are using it to review contracts, generate IT progress reports, summarize meetings and emails, and improve Power Point presentations, among other things, Harris says. The target is for all employees to have access to Copilot by the end of 2026, he says.

Toastmasters’ call center team is also using Copilot for case management of the more than 8,000 calls and chats it gets each month from members.

After they answer questions on everything from how to log on to the website to how to better run a club, each call or chat is automatically transcribed on Omnichannel. The team uses Copilot to summarize the transcript, then cut and paste the summary into case management files for easy retrieval and follow-up.

“It makes the case management one voice,” says Danie Carver, club quality and member support department coordinator. “The caller called about this subject. The resolution was this. There’s no editorializing. The main goal is efficiency.”

Another use of Copilot is to overhaul education materials. Toastmasters has an extensive online library of materials for club officers — how to run a successful meeting, how to recruit new members — as well as for members, covering leadership skills, debating skills and more.

Earlier this year, the team used Copilot to edit materials from about college level to an eighth-grade reading level, partly to cater to members whose first language is not English. While materials are also available in more than a dozen other languages, from Spanish to Greek to Hindi to Chinese to soon, Maori and Khmer, many regard Toastmasters as an opportunity to practice English.

Kate Wingrove, director of education programs and training, says Copilot roughly halved the time it would usually take to edit 20 to 30 pages of content from two days to one.

“Prior to that point, I was probably feeling a bit resistant. There’s a little bit of fear sometimes that companies are going to replace humans with AI,” she says.

Copilot suggested shorter sentences, use of active voice and simpler vocabulary overall. It still took a team member to sift through the suggestions and accept or decline changes, Wingrove says. “I recognized it as a pretty powerful tool that can support team members in doing their job more efficiently and more effectively without taking over the human component of what they do,” she says.

Harris says the IT department is now exploring building AI agents on Copilot Studio to automate tasks such as answering questions on HR policy and handling cybersecurity threats.

What doesn’t change

Looking ahead, the organization is likely to get even more global.

In India, for example, growth is driven by young professionals and students who see Toastmasters as a launch pad to the international business community, says Deepak Menon, who is based in New Delhi and served as international president in 2019/2020.

“It has been embraced by younger people in this part of the world,” says Menon, a practicing chartered accountant.

When he joined in 2002, says Menon, there were five Toastmasters clubs in India, concentrated in New Delhi and Bangalore. Today, there are more than 1,400 clubs across India, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh and Bhutan, with close to 30,000 members. “We are only at the tip of the iceberg in terms of our membership,” Menon says.

As the organization continues to grow, its leaders are clear about preserving what makes Toastmasters special. Rivals offer online public speaking and leadership courses, but the in-person meeting remains a key differentiator for the organization.

When meetings went online during the pandemic, “some members did not like that,” says Stefano McGhee, Toastmasters’ first vice president, whose day job is senior director of technology operations at Harvard Business Publishing in Brighton, Massachusetts. “There was a sentiment that people were mailing it in. The quality went down.” Most clubs have since gone back to physical meetings though some still offer hybrid options.

Generative AI has similarly raised eyebrows.

“The big concern I heard was that AI would take over everything,” he says. “AI could be able to write your speeches and that would pretty much negate the need for people because AI could do everything.

“What I’ve tried to steer our members toward is the idea that AI is a partner. It’s here to help you, not do the work.”

Recently, McGhee, who is slated to take over soon as international president, was writing a speech on shifting the focus of the organization from adding new clubs to growing high-performing clubs.

“Larger clubs do better mentorship and are less frenetic,” he says, because there is someone assigned to each specific role. Every meeting requires someone to run it, a timekeeper, evaluators and a grammarian. “With a smaller number of people, you may find they have to do multiple roles.”

For background, he asked Copilot to find studies on the broader decline in membership of fraternal clubs in the U.S. He also asked Copilot to come up with 10 questions the audience might ask him. (“What about rural clubs?” was one.)

Ultimately, says McGhee, it will still be him, drawing on his personal experience and powers of persuasion, delivering the speech. He will probably roam around the room. Put his hand down on a table. Make eye contact. Connect.

“AI is not going to do that for you.”

Top photo: A Toastmasters meeting. (Photos courtesy of Toastmasters unless noted otherwise)