Speakers Hive - Progress Report - 06-Jan-2026

Speaker Hive is now 23 weeks old. We have made several phenomenal accomplishments, in the last 2 months (Read our last progress update from 9th Nov 2025). This blog post captures some of our key accomplishments, goals/future plans and challenges.

Key Accomplishments:

1. Membership - We have 79 registered members as of today (24 members registered for the offline hive and 55 members registered for the online hive). Our Speakers Hive Interest group has 288 participants. 

2. Chapters - We kick started our first offline hive chapter in Hari OM Vidhyalaya School, K.K Nagar on 16th Nov 2025. Our chief guest was Mr. V. Nandakumar IRS. Since chartering, we have conducted 7 successful meetings.  We now have 2 online chapters (Sat/Sun) and 1 offline chapter (Sun). Each of our online and offline meetings are attended by an average of 20 participants (including members and guests). So, we are able to help nearly 60 people develop their speaking skills every week. 

3. Curriculum - Our first set of manuals were printed and handed over to members of the offline hive. We have started working on the advance project manuals. 

4. Hive Officers - We have officially installed Hive Officers for Saturday and Sunday Online chapters. This is a major milestone in the evolution of Speakers Hive. And the first set of hive officers are going to be very special. Our new hive officers have taken complete ownership of our online chapters. 

• Saturday Chapter - Bhavana C (Chief Hive Officer), Rajalakshmi G (L&D Manager), Balaguru S (Members Success Manager) and Rithika B (Hive Growth Manager).
• Sunday Chapter - Vijay Prasaad KT (Chief Hive Officer), Shanthini AJ (L&D Manager), Anjaneyulu B (Members Success Manager) and Ganeshkumar SK (Hive Growth Manager).

5. Marketing & Promotion - We continue to share periodic updates regarding Speakers Hive in all the social media channels - LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. Recently, we listed ourselves in Meetup and EventBrite. We also placed a small advertisement in Mambalam Times. 

6. Educational Programs - We conducted 2 educational workshops during this period in our online chapters - Mentoring (Ilavenil) and Giving Constructive Feedback (Saro Velrajan). We conduct a workshop almost every week in our offline chapter. We have conducted workshop on voice modulation, hand gestures, speech topics selection and using rhetorical devices. We completed the New Members Orientation for all the 3 hive chapters. 

7. Administration & IT - We successfully opened a bank account after lots of hardships. We were able to automate our members enrollment process by integrating with Razor Pay. Members/Guests will automatically get a welcome email post their registration from our website. We were also able to simplify the roll out of agenda to all the members/guests every week by using Zoho Campaigns. 

Goals / Future Plans

1. Administration & IT - Integrate guest/membership enrollment with Zoho CRM to automate the process of mailing list management. This will also help in the future when we manage membership renewals. Explore options to copyright certain terms and materials. 

2. Curriculum - Complete the preparation of all the advanced manuals

3. Certifications - Define and Streamline the process of issuing certificates when educational milestones are achieved. 

4. Membership - Reach 40 offline members by Jun 2026. 

Challenges

1. At this point, we are facing 2 significant challenges - finding mentors for members; finding peer-reviewers to evaluate the performance of speakers. A handful of people are stepping up to fill this gap. As members make progress in their educational journey and achieve more proficiency, we expect the overhead to come down.