About Money Mastery Toastmasters Club (Singapore)

Money Mastery Toastmasters Club (MMTMC) began as an in-house club of Mastery Asia. To benefit more people, MMTMC was subsequently opened to the public in 2003.

The club now provides dedicated mentoring in the mastery of public speaking and leadership while striving to create a warm and vibrant family. In April 2023, the club reached 100 active members.

Source: MMTMC's Website

The "Problem"

A Toastmasters club runs chapter meetings so that:

• Members can practice their public speaking skills
• Non-members will be convinced to join the club

To provide the best speaking experience for its members, MMTMC usually hosts its meetings at Lifelong Learning Institute. The venue provides speakers with a stage and can accommodate up to 60 people.

Non-members have to pay a $15 entrance fee, so being able to market our meetings effectively will greatly help cover the costs of the venue.

This responsibility fell on me as one of the Vice President of Public Relations (VPPR) who was comfortable with graphic design.

Approach

Gathering Design Guidelines

Since MMTMC already had a "brand", I decided every graphic must:

• Feature the club’s logo
• Use one of the club’s brand colors (red, maroon, and dark blue)
• Show imagery or symbols related to “public speaking”
• Be related to the meeting’s theme

Otherwise, I was given free rein for the designs.

Timeline of Designs

March 2020

The first meeting I promoted as a VPPR had to be moved online due to COVID-19. Having promoted an in-person chapter meeting earlier, I designed a cancellation post with a reference to HTTP error codes:

May 2020

As the pandemic raged, there was a lot of confusion about what can and cannot be done under government-imposed COVID-19 restrictions. Online meetings also became “the new normal”, but our club strived to be different—we didn’t want our club meetings to be “just another Zoom meeting”.

With a lot of effort from the executive committee and club advisors, we finally had our meetings in May on an interactive, Airmeet-like platform named Remo.

I wanted my graphics to reflect how our club embraced this new normal.

So, I tried something different, leveraging undraw.co‘s illustrations for a clean, modern, and vector-based style:

June 2020

However, the Instagram metrics for the vector-based graphics were disappointing.

Upon reflection and feedback from other club members, I agreed that the vector-based style could be too different from what people expected from a Toastmasters club.

Hence, I switched back to a picture-based style for the month of June (my last month as a VPPR):

Statistics

• Tools: Figma (Free Plan), Pen & Paper for brainstorming
• Time Taken: ~2h for each graphic (including ideation, excluding iterations)
• Engagement & Reach:
  • The number of non-members that attended these meetings tripled compared to the previous year
  • The club’s Instagram account following grew by 30%

Reflection

This experience highlighted the importance of having a brand with consistent visual identity.

If it looks off-brand, it can create confusion—even if it 'looks nice'.

Nonetheless, I am grateful to have had the freedom to try out different design styles during this period of time.