 If you are the club president or secretary of a Toastmasters club, you have an important role to play. You get to determine who will be the future leaders in Toastmasters. In this video, I'm going to show you how to make your vote count. Let's get started. You should have received this email from Toastmasters International. The email has instructions on how to assign the club proxy and how to cast your vote in case you decide to do it yourself. Every active Toastmasters club gets to cast two votes. As the club president or the secretary, the first thing you need to do is decide who you should vote for. Once that decision is made, assign a proxy before the deadline. In case you assign the proxy to yourself, indicate the intent to vote also before the deadline. And finally, vote within the voting window. Let's go through these four steps in detail. To understand what is planned at the annual business meeting, go to the Toastmasters website, go to events and select international convention. In our case, it's the 2021 international convention. Click on it. Lots of things happen at this event, including the world championship of public speaking. But what we are interested in is this annual business meeting. Even instructions are available on this page, including the deadlines. For example, when will the proxy assignment start? When will the proxy assignment close? The credential process. When will it be conducted? The training for the casting of your ballots. The most important information for us is the candidate's brochure. We want to know who are our future leaders. This document gives you all the details of the candidates, their profile and what they bring to Toastmasters. You should spend some time going through these profiles because you get to decide who will be the future leader among this list. Now that we have a good understanding of the process, we head over to club central to assign the proxy. For this year, the deadline for proxy assignment is August 16. Once again, go to the Toastmasters website, go to leadership central and go to club central. If you are not already logged in to the website, it will ask you to login, provide your credentials and click login. Select the club that you are a president or the secretary. In my case, I'm the president of queer challenges Toastmasters club. Click on it. Scroll down till you find club proxy. There are three ways you can assign a proxy. You have to choose one of these methods if you want your club vote to count. If proxy assignment is not done, your club will not be able to vote. The first choice is to designate a club delegate. Any active club member can vote on behalf of the club, including yourself. To designate a club delegate, click on this option and select the member from the list. The second option is to hand over the responsibility of your club votes to your district director. When business meetings were conducted in person, this used to be the most popular method. But with online annual business meetings, you have an option to cast your own votes. And the third option is to designate another Toastmaster who is not from your club, but he is going to vote on the club's behalf. In all three cases, we can decide how the proxy will vote. If we choose the candidates that we want to vote for, then the proxy is called an instructed proxy. His or her role is only to cast the vote. They cannot decide which candidate to vote for. On the other hand, if we leave the choice of voting to the proxy, then that proxy is called an uninstructed proxy. If you want to create an instructed proxy, click on this checkbox. You will get a list of all the positions that are being voted for and the candidates in each section. For example, if you have made a choice for a specific candidate in a specific category, let's say for example in region 5 and I click on this, I see there are two candidates. If you decide one of these candidates should get your two votes, click on that candidate's name. If you leave any categories blank, then the proxy gets a choice to decide how to vote in that category. Once you have made your choice, scroll down, enter your signature and click confirm votes. You will get a summary of your proxy assignment including any instructions that you have given for a specific category. You may print it for your club records. You can change the proxy assignment anytime before the deadline by going back to the club proxy and clicking this option, which will take you back to the same place. If you decide to designate your district director or another Toastmaster, then your role in proxy assignment is done. However, if you decide that you want to cast your own votes as I have done in my case, then we go to step number three, indicating your intent to vote. To indicate your intent to vote, go to your profile. In your profile section, you will find something called view proxy information. Click on it. As you can see, I have a proxy assigned to my name. If I click on the plus sign, I can see if any instructions have been given or whether it will be my choice to cast the vote to a candidate that I deem fit. The next step is to wait between August 17 and August 20 where Toastmasters International will open up the proxies and I have to go back to my profile and click on I intend to vote. This will trigger the credentials process and this must be completed for you to cast your vote. If you are a proxy holder, you will get additional instructions on how to cast your vote. On August 26, you have 24 hours to log into your profile and complete the voting process. That was a quick overview of the proxy assignment process and how to make your club vote count. So make it count.