I'm just wondering how many PTO groups use Face Book. Does it work for you? Do you have a lot of followers? Are there any legal issues involved?

Any feedback would be great!

I have had many parents ask me if we planned on making a FB account.

We do have a Facebook Account, and all of the Executive Board has the password so we can log in and respond to emails, and post pertinent information. It has really worked out for us, in communicating with our community, and parents who are not able to attend meetings, but still want to be involved. We post our meeting minutes, and recruit volunteers through posting about needing them. We also use it to post links about stuff we or the school has decided parents need to educate themselves on.
We had one negative experience, our principal didn't like that we had kids' pictures on it. We responded by asking for a list of names whose parents didn't return the permission slip at the beginning of the year for being in pictures for the school. We don't post those kids pictures, and also at all of our events now, it is posted that your picture might be used for advertising events, or on Facebook.
Overall,it has been a very positive thing for us.

We are actually a PTA and have both a Facebook Group page and a Twitter account. We were stongly encouraged by National PTA to expand our PTA's presence via FB and Twitter. I rarely use the Twitter. Facebook has been great for us!

We have 130 members on our FAcebook Group-Carmel Elementary School PTA-as of this evening. Feel free to join our group if you like and you wil get a sense of how we use it. We do have a few hundred pictures on our Facebook and a bunch of videos. I only tag the kids (with their parents names) if I personally know the family and am sure they are okay with the tagging. Otherwise I let the parents decide for themselves whether or not they want to tag their children. Since we are in an Elementary School the majority of our students do not have their own FB accounts.

I find that FB is the easiest way to send communications. I do not need to worry about bounce backs or domains that think my email is spam.

I could go on with more details. Feel free to direct message me at carmelpta at gmail dot com.

Hope this helps!

Gary

Exploring this idea for our PTO...did you start your groups from a personal FB account, or did you create a whole new FB account and then created your group from there? I'm leaning towards a group rather than a page, since you can lock it and approve the people who join. Any additional thoughts? THanks.

Sharon,

I created a whole new Facebook account and then from there created the Facebook Group for our PTA. I did it this way so that future PTA officers could have access without having any disruption. I do not accept friend requests to the new Facebook account since I do not want to have to manage that and all it entails. I have a standard email reply that I use when I get friend requests. I am happy to email you that if you like. I set up the Group so that I am one of the administrators for it.

Hope that helps!

Gary

We have a FB fan page for our school. It isn't necessarily run by the PTO, but I, as the volunteer webmaster, am an officer of the PTO. I handle our school's web site, FB page and Twitter account. We're trying a number of things to see how we can best communicate with our families.

Our Facebook page is up to about 50 fans. To the person who was thinking of going the way of a Group instead—the great thing about a fan page is that the updates show up in people's news feed, whereas posts to a group do not. We mostly use our FB page for reminders, quick updates (like, today's a snow day) and sometimes deals, like for required school supplies or Market Day's deals of the week.

I love the idea of putting our meeting minutes there. We post our PTO newsletters to the school web site, but I've been struggling with what to do with the meeting minutes. That may be an option.