Page 16 - February 2020

FROM THE DESK
Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
PJ Kleffner, DTM - Program Quality Director
“There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damned Lies
and Statistics”. That quote is usually attributed to
humorist Mark Twain. Statistics can be useful to
support an argument, show trends, or as 73.6% of
people believe, are simply made up on the spot.
As we wrap up the second round of Club
officer training for this year, I recently had
a conversation with several of my PQD
counterparts in our Region. We were looking
at the percentage of Clubs in our Districts who
had sent at least four officers to Toastmasters
Leadership Institute (TLI), or a make-up session.
Four Club officers attending two rounds of
training is the minimum requirement to meet
goal #9 in the Distinguished Club Program.
We were pondering the effectiveness of officer
training and how it might contribute to the
overall success of our Clubs.
Determining Club success can be subjective.
Most of us know those Clubs that never seem to
meet enough goals or membership requirements
to achieve Distinguished Club status, but they
have a strong core group and have been around
for many years. For my purposes, I need an
objective measure of Club success, so I will
focus on the Distinguished Club Program
16 ONE COMMUNITY
(DCP). Newer members may not be familiar
with the DCP, which is simply a list of ten goals
that Toastmasters International (TI) gives our
Clubs each year. TI has determined through
decades of experience, that these ten goals are
a pretty good measure whether or not a Club is
working the Toastmasters program and meeting
the educational goals of their members. There
are three levels of recognition in the program
– Clubs that meet 5-6 goals are Distinguished,
7-8 goals are Select Distinguished and 9-10 goals
are Presidents Distinguished.
Being a curious person, I downloaded data
for the last two complete Toastmasters years, and
started crunching numbers. For the 2018-2019
Toastmasters year, I discovered the following:
• A total of 56 out of 180 Clubs (31%) achieved
Distinguished status or higher.
• 53 of those 56 Clubs (95%) had at least four
officers trained at one or both training
sessions.
• 85 Clubs had at least four officers trained
at both sessions. 39 of those clubs (46%)
achieved Distinguished status or higher,
a significantly higher percentage than the
31% for all Clubs in general.