Most of the meeting roles here at Casterbridge Speakers are described in detail on the Toastmasters website, via the following link: https://www.toastmasters.org/Membership/Club-Meeting-Roles. Two roles that are not described on the Toastmasters website are Meet and Greet and Sergeant at Arms, so we’ve taken the liberty of describing them here.
Meet-and-greet and Sergeant-at-arms generally go together: Meet and Greet’s role is to greet people as they arrive, and make sure visitors sign the guest book.
Sergeant-at-arms is, in principle, in charge of setting up the room, making sure:
- the chairs are out nicely
- everyone has a ballot slip
- the banner is up and the lectern out
- the name-badges are out
- the timekeeping equipment is set up and working
(In practice, anyone who’s around mucks in with all of that.)
In the meeting, the sergeant-at-arms:
- Gives a warning before the meeting starts
- Opens the meeting (big gavel-bang, energetic and friendly welcome; remind everyone where the toilets and emergency exits are, and to turn off their phones, hands over to the president)
- Collects voting slips whenever there’s a vote
- Warns about the start of the second half, then opens it (welcome back; hand over to topics master)
And afterwards, helps with packing up (again, that’s normally an everyone-mucks-in job).