District 60 Toastmasters Spring Conference

I am away this weekend at the District 60 Toastmasters Spring Conference. What an event! The schedule was packed to the point of hectic so I had to pick and choose what to do and see.

Of course, I attended both contests. As you may have already read on my site at http://www.speakersandtrainers.net the International Speech Contest was fantastic. James Ng from Brampton won with his speech "25 and some months" an original, inspiring and instructive look on how to not grow old but not die young.

Today though was even better! At the Sunday brunch we had the pleasure of meeting last year's World Champion of Public Speaking: Vikas Jhingran. Now, I had heard prior to this that sometimes when the world champion comes to a Toastmaster's conference they can be convinced to deliver their winning speech from World's.

Vikas was confronted by a very enthusiastic audience this morning. When given the choice of his regional or world speech, we asked for both... and he not only delivered, he explained how he developed the speeches and what made them International contest level speeches from an engineered standpoint.

In addition when time came for questions, he was asked to perform the speech that won him through district (it takes three unique speeches to win all the way to world level). We were thrilled when he complied.

All this in addition to his keynote on how to rise to the top in speaking. What an inspiring morning.... my first time hearing a world champion in person and the high point of a great conference.

Customer Relationship Management Solutions???

I have spent the last year casually looking for a replacement to my Goldmine Contact Management software.

Goldmine is just not designed to be easily set up to accommodate multiple email addresses, lists and opt-in forms.

I use aweber and I do love it. Unlimited lists, messages and autoresponders, integration with Google Analytics and PayPal. Great product! However - I want to be able to add offline opt-ins easily. Not at the rate of 10 a day. And not at a double-opt-in level.
I also want to be able to store my own template. I am a graphic designer and it seems a shame to have to pick away at code every time I want to send a newsletter.

I have looked at http://www.salesforce.com and do love them too.... except you are limited to 1000 emails a day. Not useful for sending to a list of 10,000 when your offer is time sensitive. Granted I could buckle on another email sender like Vertical Response but then I am charged by the email. I already pay for hosting and ISP, I do not see what value is provided.

So I have just purchased MailLoop - after contemplating it for years. What I appreciate is that it has all the features of aweber plus list import, template creation, my own email addresses AND no monthly fees. I bought the pro version for $379 - the tutorials that come with it are worth that!

Now I just need to implement it - another learning curve to climb! Oh well - this version has a lot of built in wizards to speed up the task. I will be using this software to manage my site http://www.speakersandtrainers.net launching in May.