How to get started
1) Find a venue
You're going to need a place in your town or city to host your speaking club. When choosing a place, think about how many people are likely to come. You could choose a pub – alcohol usually helps fluency ;) – a café, or you could rent a room if you want to run it privately.
Pubs and cafés will probably appreciate the custom that you bring, but maybe not so much the noise, so it's best to speak to the manager of the place before you decide on your destination.
2) Structured or not?
Decide if you want your speaking club to be one big social gathering without a topic, where people just come, sit down and basically just have a conversation with the people at their table, or if you want to have a specific topic with questions.
If you choose the more structured route, you (or someone else) will have to host it. That means preparing questions and/or tasks, and being ready to manage the speaking club and keep things moving.
3) Advertise
Now you have the place and have decided how you're going to run the speaking club, you need people to know it exists – and to come.
A good start is creating a Facebook group or Instagram page and paying to advertise the first couple of meetings. This way you can advertise locally and target the right type of person: those who are interested in English and want to speak English.
Also, if your city is listed on our site (for example, Toruń), contact us and we will list your speaking club for FREE.
4) Charge people or not?
If you're going to host an English speaking club in a private place where you have to pay to hire the room, then it makes sense to charge people to help cover the cost. Plus, if you're going to put in the work to create interesting speaking clubs, your hard work should be rewarded.
If you're going down the more informal, social-gathering route in a public place, then it's usually best to keep them free.
5) ONLY ENGLISH
It's called an English speaking club because the language is English. The reason why everyone has come is to SPEAK ENGLISH – not Italian, French, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish or Czech.
Try to remain in English as much as possible. If you have lower-level participants, you can translate a little, but still try to encourage English-only usage as much as you can.
6) Have fun
Make sure you're having fun! Make sure you're hosting the speaking club for the right reasons and ask for feedback to help improve.
Good luck, and who knows – maybe next time I'm in your city, I'll come to your English speaking club ;)