PTO Today

Is your group helping parents understand and manage the Internet and all its related risks and opportunities? If not, you’re missing out on a great chance to serve and connect with parents. I know I really appreciated when our school HSA put on an educational evening for parents at our school.

As the parent of a 12-year-old (and three more coming after), yes — the Internet scares me. I love all the things it makes possible for our family. But I’m also leery of the social mistakes that are so much easier for kids to make these days. I think back to my youthful missteps and shudder at the thought of having all of them captured for eternity on computer servers. Yikes.

It’s why I’m such a big fan of PTOs and PTAs putting on Internet Safety Nights at their schools. Whether you do it with local law enforcement or by using our ready-made Internet Safety Night planning kit (which comes with a built-in expert presentation), it’s a topic that many of your parents are actively concerned about. It’s the most requested service topic among parents we’ve surveyed.

To me, building parent involvement at school, building a community around the school, then serving parents on school-related topics are three pillars of PTO and PTA work. Internet Safety Night fills that third bill perfectly.

We’d love to hear if your group has already planned or is planning anything around this key topic. Would you share your group’s thoughts on addressing Internet Safety on our message boards?

Welcome back to school. My tip this week focuses on helping you find your replacement. (How nice is that?!)

I bet you’ve seen three or four or even more new moms and dads who’ve shown higher than average interest in your group and activities. Maybe they had good questions. Maybe they’ve attended a few events and thanked you after. Maybe they’ve already volunteered once or twice. You know who they are.

These are the folks who are most likely to move up to leadership roles in the next few years. The question for you is how can you actually make that happen?

The key is to proactively work at it. Don’t count on them magically stepping up. Reach out to them and try to find some next-step roles this spring. Find out their schedules and interests and see whether you can tap into their enthusiasm or curiosity. Team them with some of your best veterans so they can see how things work well. (Note: Don’t just give them some top job with no support unless you plan on losing them really quickly.)

Too many groups do their recruitment by putting a note in the newsletter. Then they’re surprised when no one jumps up. A more organized, thoughtful approach is the key to developing your next generation of leaders.

We have several great resources to help with recruiting new leaders:

Good luck!

I’m sure you do a ton for your school. But do your key audiences really understand all that you do? I bet you talk about your fundraisers a lot. Do you talk about all that your fundraisers provide even more?

A key habit of successful PTOs and PTAs is to focus on your good work all year round. If you don’t, no one else will, and you’ll be known as “the group that always wants my money” or “the group that always wants my time” rather than “the group that does such essential work for our school.”

One of my best tips here: Make sure you tag anything and everything you purchase for the school with a nice plaque or sticker or nameplate that reads something like “Gratefully Donated by XYZ School Parents and the XYZ PTO.” Working on a playground or new risers for the auditorium? Find a way to remind all of the students and families who use those items (for the next 10 years!) that it was the good work of your PTO that made them possible.

This is not just to brag. It’s how you strategically (and consistently, and frequently) emphasize your good work. This is the kind of habit that makes your fundraisers more successful and that helps you bring in new volunteers each year. Folks like to be associated with and support successful endeavors. If you’re successful but don’t tell anyone, then that dynamic will never help you out.

We have several great articles on marketing your PTO and changing impressions:

• Basic Marketing That Builds Involvement
• Communication Tips for Better Involvement
• Put On Your Sales Hat

Good luck!

Long-time readers know that I love PTO family events. Fun and free and welcoming activities are the best ways to build a parent involvement foundation. They’re the key first step in developing new volunteers and connections.

But my tip this week involves a research-backed way to make those family events even more effective for your school: Collaborate with your teachers to connect some key academic goals with your family events. Is your school putting a big emphasis on raising math grades this year? How about holding a Family Math Olympics, then? Can your geography teacher (or music teacher, or both!) be part of an International Night where student presentations are mixed with the foods and dance and music from the many cultures represented in your school?

One key: Make sure you keep the fun — and the free. Family events work great when you take the time to plan nights that attract large numbers of families, not just those families who are already heavily school-inclined. (A good example is this “Out of This World” astronomy family night.)

Have you made any of these connections at your school? Would love to hear your ideas on our message boards discussion.

Family nights are great. Family nights with a curriculum connection can be even better. Good luck!

Treasurer’s reports, meeting minutes, fundraising results, bank statements… how much should you make public to your parent group and the school? The question of transparency comes up a lot! In this week’s video blog Tim answers the question, “just how transparent should our parent group be?”

How open is your group with information? How do you share your records so that there are no misconceptions? We’d love to hear from you.

“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.” ~ Maya Angelou

Wouldn’t it be great if our PTOs, PTAs and school events had equal representation from every ethnic group in our schools? But, it’s harder than you think, isn’t it? Language barriers and cultural differences often prevent many families from connecting to the school community. This week Tim talks about an event that is a great starting point for reaching out to minority groups at your school and forging new connections.

We’d like to invite you to a Q & A session – live on our Facebook page - this Friday, November 5th, from 1-2pm EST.  You’ve read Tim’s tips and you’ve had your questions answered by Craig, editor of PTO Today, in our Ask a Question section. This Friday you will have a chance to connect with them “live.” Tim and Craig will be “hanging out on our wall” answering your top questions about parent involvement and the day-to-day management of your parent group. To participate you can:

• post your questions prior to Friday on the Facebook event wall.
• email me questions ahead of time at lgundlach@ptotoday.com (if you’d prefer to keep your question anonymous.)
• or post questions on our wall during the live chat.

Then hop on our Facebook page on Friday between 1 and 2pm EST.  Even if you don’t have a question, I bet you’ll learn from the conversation.  If you have any questions about this event, don’t hesitate to contact me. Also, we’d love it if you would RSVP on our Facebook event page.

So get those questions ready.  We look forward to a fun conversation with you this Friday!

When it comes to building involvement and engagement at your school, there’s no better starting point than hosting several fun, free events for families.

This is what our School Family Nights series is all about.

These kind of nights are the entry points for families, especially the families who are least likely to come to a meeting or step up out of the blue to volunteer. In other words: the parents and families you have the most trouble reaching.

Whether you use one of our free kits to host a Family Reading Night or a Family Movie Night or a Go Green Night or you come up with a creative family event of your own, these are the events that bring in families. There are so many benefits. Families having a positive time connected to school is great, even if nothing else happens. Those parents getting a new appreciation for your PTO (it’s about more than fundraising) is another. And I can tell you from experience that your volunteer recruitment gets easier after parents have connected with your school in these light ways.

Last point: Please don’t charge admission. These are exactly the kinds of events you raise money to support. And you’ll make more money from your actual major fundraisers if you resist the urge to charge for everything else. Serving parents and providing a free movie and some popcorn is a perfectly great function of your group.

Spend any time on our message boards and you soon learn that there are some very knowledgeable and considerate PTO and PTA leaders out there. This is the reason we started the “This Post Rock” program — to recognize these wonderful community members.

Here is a top line of our most recent PTO Rock Stars’ posts:

• Three cheers for clnscheffer for contributing a fabulous idea for a classroom art project for school auctions and for uploading photos of the projects.
• Critter responded to a question about implementing  basic reimbursement rules with some thoughtful advice that could save your parent group a lot of angst.
• We appreciate Slvrdrgnflygrl’s detailed post on authors to contact for auction freebies but we also commend her on her words of encouragement that she offered. Oh, and by the way, it turns out that she was writing this post the day before her school auction… like she didn’t have a million other things to do besides pass along info to our community. Amazing.
• Gmparkes post is short and sweet but it points to a bunch of files that he uploaded to our file exchange to help others working on festivals and carnivals. (See the post after his for links to these files.) We greatly appreciate when folks upload files to our File Exchange and we bet you do too. Nothing like saving hours in a project.
• When a community member vented about lack of meeting attendance barb_r not only offered some words of encouragement but she hunted down some articles and blog on our site that she thought would be helpful. Hey wait, isn’t that my job?! Thanks Barb!

Well done PTO Rock Stars. Thanks for all you do to make our community a wonderful place to share and get ideas and support!

Quick tip this week, but I’m hopeful it can make you extra hundreds or thousands at your next school auction. I call it the “quickie live auction” — and it’s a great way to make sure you maximize your dollars from your silent auction. (You can find a whole slew of additional auction tips and ideas on our dedicated PTO and PTA auctions resources page.)

If your auction is like the ones at most schools, then you put your most exciting offerings in the live auction and push the likely less competitive items into the silent auction. This is a smart model and a good way to make sure your live auction doesn’t last five hours.

But what about when you’re wrong and a few of your silent auction items get competitive? You’ve seen it — two or three parents boxing out around a bid sheet trying to be the last bid down before the deadline. And if those parents want to get a final bid down on a few different items, then they have to be Olympic sprinters. The result is that you don’t get as much money as you could for those donated items.

The solution: the quickie live auction. Mention right in your program that you reserve the right to turn any silent item into a live auction item if there is heavy interest at the deadline. Then, at deadline time, have a small step stool (nice, but not a required touch) for your bid sheet collectors and allow them to run a quick live auction (literally one or two minutes) for any competitive item. If two dads want to bid the baseball tickets up to $400, that’s how your auction maximizes its profits. The winning bidder and the price can go right down on the bid sheet, and all your processing and billing can proceed just like the rest of your silent items. Voila.

It’s definitely a switch from what parents are used to, but there’s no rule that says silent auction items should be won by the parent with the best ability to box out other parents. It’s a fundraising auction, and the quickie live format helps raise more funds.