LoveLocal is an annual community and business expo run by Porirua City Council. This year, Spinnaker Toastmasters Club mounted a booth to promote Toastmasters in the area as a membership building event, and as a Level 5 team building project for the VP Education Dale Hartle DTM.
The expo was held in Porirua on Saturday 11 July 2026, with over 5000 visitors through the door during the day. The Spinnaker team manned the booth for an hour each on a rotating schedule, talking to visitors, handing out Toastmasters pamphlets and club business cards, and collecting contact details for a follow up invitation to attend a club meeting.
The first part of Dale’s project was to present a short speech on how the event will be organised, outlining the setup and pack-down requirements, and how to work on the booth. Talking to people was critical, Dale said, and encouraged the team to approach people as they walked past, asking them questions to find out what they knew about Toastmasters, and inviting them to a meeting. As preparation for this, at the meeting before the event, Dale organised a trial setup booth and paired up a booth team member with a “visitor” in a table topics format. The team member had to engage with the visitor and practise their impromptu speaking skills to find out what it was like to talk to strangers about Toastmasters. Each pairing was given immediate feedback on how they went.
The second speech in the project was to report back on how the event went. Dale praised all the team members for their commitment to the expo and how smoothly the event ran. Making eye contact with people and starting a conversation was the hardest part, as some people deliberately look away, so just asking them “how’s your day going?” seemed to get things started.
Feedback from the expo team was positive and encouraging. One team member said one of the quotable moments was a young lady who started with “do you have any wristbands?” When we looked slightly bewildered and answered “no, but we have stickers and fridge magnets”, they promptly left!
Other visitors were looking to get back into the workforce, so interview skills were important, and learning how to organise and manage team meetings and projects also ranked high on the list.
Overall, Dale says LoveLocal 2026 was an extremely successful team event where team members got to know each other and themselves a little more. Each person discovered how their impromptu speaking skills were useful when engaging with the public and reacting to their response. The VP Membership is now following up with all our contacts to invite them to a future Spinnaker meeting.
Spinnaker Toastmasters Club, Plimmerton, Porirua, New Zealand 