Making meetings work is a frequent challenge for all parent groups, and my advice this week is to think differently. There’s no global law that says you have to read last month’s minutes at every meeting. Use your website and email to distribute them beforehand.

There are all kinds of sacred cows (the budget report, having the meeting every month in the first place) that you can choose to change. I loved this post on our message boards last week — read how this group is approaching meetings in a new way. Can you borrow some of these ideas? Their approach may or may not be right for your group, but it’s a great example of thinking differently.

I bet you’ll also like these resources from ptotoday.com on making meetings better:

• Successful Meetings: 14 Tips
• Meetings File Exchange
• Meetings/Robert’s Rules topic page

If something isn’t working, don’t be afraid to change it up. Often that kind of spirit can spread throughout your group and lead to surprisingly great results.

Some of the ways that Tim suggests to promote your group are:

• newsletters
• local newspaper articles (write a press release)
• brass plaques

We also hear of many groups using Twitter and Facebook to toot their horn a bit and grow involvement.

How does your group get the word out to your school about your hard work? We’d love to hear from you.

You can order a free Family Movie Night planning kit on our website, plus find info on all of our School Family Nights. To me, these kinds of involvement events are a welcome mat to deeper involvement. Don’t charge admission. Don’t give folks the hard sell that they have to help out. Just make it a great night. The good news is that some of your attendees will have a great time and feel more comfortable getting more connected. That’s how more involvement develops — not through guilt or the like.

We’ve also recently added a brand-new Family Movie Night ”group” in our Community section on ptotoday.com. Here, you can share what’s worked and what hasn’t with other leaders running the same kind of event. We’ve even got a movie tracker, so you can review which movies worked best for school nights. I really like the movie Cars, for example, but it was a terrible choice for our last Movie Night — just way too long for 90 K-5th graders. Wish I’d known that before we picked it.

Good luck with all your involvement efforts!

There have been dozens of articles out in recent weeks with predictions for this coming flu season and tons of news about schools possibly being the first line of defense in preventing the flu from really devastating communities.  It makes sense – schools are both: 1) where kids can so easily pass bugs from one to another; and 2) where we can most easily get the kids in one place for prevention.

That’s why I’m so thankful for Teach Flu a Lesson. The free kit has everything you need to know about your PTO or PTA bringing vaccinations right to your school.  Great fit as part of a health fair or as part of a Health Week or – this year especially – as a stand-alone program, since interest and concern is so high.   Hit that link to learn more or sign up.

Plan out your entire year. Write down all the activities, programs, fundraisers, etc. that you hope to run. Include when they’ll start and when they’ll end. Think about how much each one will cost (or raise), and think about how many volunteers you’ll need for each. You want to make sure that you have a balanced year, that you aren’t caught off guard, and that you have the resources you need at the time you need them. And by the way, it’s OK to change your plan along the way. Starting with a road map makes picking a new route a lot easier.

Plan to build involvement. How will you attract the volunteers you need and the participation you’re hoping for? Getting people connected to the school and to your group through family events and low-key activities is an important first step. Make sure a big part of your plan for the year focuses on building involvement. The better you do that, the easier everything else will become.

Use our tools. We have lots of free planning tools on ptotoday.com. Finances are not a sexy topic, but we have two terrific articles
that walk you through the basics of creating a budget for the year and figuring a budget for a specific event, even if it’s one you’ve
never run before. Our 2 Hour Power volunteer pledge program has proved to be a successful way to build involvement all year long. And ”9-Stress Busting Organization Tips” offers a nice list of objectives to make your year a success.

We’ve been following trends with school auctions for years now, and cMarket’s work in that space has been the most interesting recent development. First, it was just adding online bidding to your traditional school auction. That’s worth a look in its own right. More recently, though, the offering has gotten even better, as cMarket now has a host of items that you can add to your auction at no risk to you. Things like vacations and hotel nights that can only add dollars to your auction’s bottom line. I know the auction chairs at my children’s school used cMarket for the first time last fall and – besides some nice results from adding online in general (they placed several of the silent items into an “online only” category) — they also made nearly $1,000 extra just from the items that cMarket added to the auction.

The upshot: if your group is running an auction, definitely worth exploring how cMarket can help you make it better. URL = www.cmarket.com

So it looks like our 2010 Expo schedule is firming up.  The cool news — several more Expos in 2010 than in years past.  There will be 8 or 9 in the 2nd semester of this coming school year.

Old stalwarts Boston, Philly and Chicago?  Check.

Coming back to Columbus and Minneapolis? Check.

Bringing the band to Houston, St. Louis and Tennessee?  Hmmmmm.

Watch for complete details and dates in August. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update?  Subscribe to our e-newsletter, the Leader Lowdown.

The trick is that it doesn’t happen by accident. You may want to use an opt-in form so that parents can give you those addresses and give you permission to email. You’ll most likely need a different system (and a separate OK from parents) than what the school itself uses. You’ll also want to talk to your principal now so that she knows and is OK with your plan for communicating via email.

Another step is deciding how you’ll be emailing, where those email addresses will be stored, etc. While some groups still use one member’s email account, that can be very limiting, and better solutions exist. The best example is our new, free Parent Express Email service that manages all the addresses and helps you send good-looking emails quickly and easily. It’s definitely worth a look for the new year.

Simple as it is, I consider email the PTO “killer app” of 2009-10. It’s definitely time to get on board.