To DCP or not to DCP

What is the DCP?

The DCP is the Distinguished Club Program and it is Toastmasters International’s way of evaluating how successful a club is. Using the club results, it can then measure how well an area, division or district is doing…

How does it measure success?

It’s all about points.

If a club gets 5 or 6 points then they are a Distinguished Club

If a club gets 7 or 8 points then they are a Select Distinguished Club

If a club gets 9 or 10 points then they are a President’s Distinguished Club

Not only do you get the bragging rights of saying that you’re distinguished, select etc, you also get a nice shiny ribbon to put on your club flag!

How do we get points?

Below is a list of ten goals. For each goal completed we get a point.

1. Two Competent Communicators (CCs)
2. Two More CCs
3. One Advanced Communicator Bronze (ACB), Advanced Communicator Silver (ACS) or Advanced Communicator Gold (ACG)
4. One more ACB, ACS, or ACG
5. One Competent Leader (CL), Advanced Leader Bronze (ALB), Advanced Leader Silver (ALS) or Distinguished Toastmaster (DTM)
6. One more CL, ALB, ALS, DTM
7. Four new members
8. Four more new members
9. Minimum of four club officers trained during each of the two training periods
10. One dues renewal report and one club officer list submitted on time

How many points did we get?

We did very well, for the first time ever we got nine points, this makes us a President’s Distinguished club.

We are one of only two President’s Distinguished clubs in the Netherlands.

This was achieved with our small band of 25 members while the other club is much larger with 44 members making our achievement all the more glorious.

Add to this the fact that we won the District International Speech contest and this makes Utrecht Toastmasters undeniably the best club in the Netherlands.

It’s been a good year.

How realistic is the DCP?

I feel that while the DCP is a handy indicator, it shouldn’t be used as the yardstick to measure all clubs against, it discriminates against small clubs, young clubs and struggling clubs. The bigger and more experienced a club is then the easier it is to get the award but does this really mean that a club is successful?

Instead we should be asking less quantitative questions and more qualitative questions as it is the quality of the club which will really makes it successful.

To measure the quality of a club we must first ask four simple questions:

1. Do members attend regularly?

2. Do guests want to join?

3. Are we becoming better speakers?

4. Are we having fun?

If we can answer yes to all these questions then all the metrics in the world don’t matter because we have already have a successful club.