Speakers Hive - Progress Report - 12-Jun-2026

 We are now 45 weeks old. It's almost 2 months since we shared our last progress update (on 4th Apr 2026). This blog post captures some of our key accomplishments, goals/future plans and challenges. 

1. Membership 

• We have 117 registered members as of today. We crossed the 100 members milestone on 5th April 2026.  Ria Monsurate (a student) was our 100th member.
• We added 9 new members to our offline chapter (bringing the offline membership count to 43) and 11 new members added to our online chapters (bringing the online membership count to 74) in the 2 months period. 
• Our Speakers Hive Interest group (for guests) has about 317 members. (Note: Some of our registered members are also in this group)
• We started our membership renewals process. (43 members have renewed, so far). We have decided not to ask for renewals for members who have joined in last week of May and in the month of Jun. Their membership will be active till Dec 2026.

2. Chapters

• Our online chapters are functioning independently - Right from planning, arranging the role players, coaching the role players and successfully conducting the weekly meetings - all activities are handled by the Hive Officers. 
• Online chapters have operationalized the Meeting Organizer, Promotions Manager and Recognitions Manager (TBD for the offline chapter).
• We have completed contests at the hive level and zonal level. This is a remarkable accomplishment by the team (Hive Officers and Contest Chairs - Vijay Prasaad, Gopi Ramalingam, Ganesh Kumar and their extended teams), For the offline chapter the load was shared by Saro / Sudha and Poorni. The Zonal level contests were conducted online. The speeches in both the Story Telling and JAM Talks Contests were of great quality)
• Completed the hive officers election at our offline chapter (Chennai Speakers Hive). With more hands ready to help, we can easily streamline the processes and improve the members engagement and meeting quality. It is planned for the online chapters on 13th and 14th Jun weekend.
• We celebrated the 25th Meeting milestone at our offline chapter (Chennai Speakers Hive). The celebrations created sweet memories for both members and guests. This was organized by Poornima Sunkara and team.
• We now have peer-reviewers from within each chapter - eliminating the dependency with a handful of people. We are slowly starting to groom mentors from within our hive chapters. 

3. Educational Programs & Milestones

A number of educational programs were conducted during this period.

• Harishankkar Subramanyam (Co-founder of eCon) delivered a session on "Setting Goals" at our offline chapter
• Finding Topics for Hive Talks by Sudha Rajesh in Sunday online chapter.
• Reaching Greater Heights by Vijayarangan Lakshmipath in our offline chapter
• Vijay Prasaad is the first member to complete Speech Mastery Beginning Level 1 Milestone. This is a historical achievement. He was able to complete that in a 9 months period.

4. Curriculum

Here are some accomplishments related to curriculum development:

• The Hive Officers roles are now documented in a manual (Leadership Mastery - Beginner - Level 2). This provides more clarity on the roles/responsibilities of the Hive Officers. 
• Creation of advanced manuals took a pause because of contests, elections etc.,

5. Marketing & Promotion

• We continue to share periodic updates regarding Speakers Hive meetings/accomplishments in all the social media channels - LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook. We keep sharing our offline meetup information in Meetup.com using their free subscription (2 listings a month).
• We made two attempts to get some coverage in Hindu Downtown. But, both attempts failed. 
• Speakers Foundry (Sun online) and Speakers Alchemy (Sat online) have created their own online channels for promotions

7. Administration & IT - 

• Weekly syncups / planning meetings are ongoing
• Automation of Renewal process for members, by integrating Zoho Sheets with Zoho Forms, providing a seamless experience for members to complete their renewals

8. Goals and Future Plans

• Plan and Organize the "1st Anniversary Celebrations" event (Balaguru has stepped up as the Special Events Chairman)
• Administrative & IT - Explore options to copyright certain terms and materials. 
• Complete the membership renewals by 30th June 2026. (Target: Make at least 80 members renew / 111 existing members)
• Plan for starting a new club in Velachery area to attract people from Madipakkam, Medavakkam, OMR, Nanganallur, Velachery etc., (Target: July / August 2026)

9. Challenges

Here is the list of challenges faced by Speakers Hive community:

• The Hive Officers have not developed the habit to measure progress using KPIs and share them periodically with all the members (This would motivate the members to excel and do better)
• Some hive officers go inactive without arranging a replacement / backup for their role. Succession planning is a leadership trait that they'll have to master. 
• Member Success Managers are falling short of expectations (for example, they are not consistently recognising monthly member accomplishments - best role player for the month, 100% attendance etc., It was done once in March and not done after that). This is also related to Challenge #1.
• We ended up cancelling an offline chapter meeting during the last week of May 2026 - due to unavailability of several key organizers (school summer holidays season & vacations). We should aspire to NOT CANCEL any meetings in the future. 
• Need to groom more mentors and peer-reviewers in each chapter.