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!

Merry Christmas and happy holidays, everyone. I hope these weeks bring you well-deserved joy (and rest)!

Before we sign off for the year, I thought I’d write an email for you to use for the New Year. Please feel free to steal it or edit it to make it your own. January is a great time to reemphasize the key spirit behind your group. Here’s my recommendation for a New Year’s message from your parent group:

There’s my version. If you have your own, we’d love to see it; feel free to share your version on the File Exchange.

Thanks for all you’ve done in 2010; wishing you all the best in 2011.

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!

Very practical tip for you this week: If your group hasn’t signed up for our early 2011 “Healthy School Kids” program yet, you should. Here’s a link for more info and to sign up:
http://www.ptotoday.com/healthy-school-kids-samples

This is our second year for HSK, and it was one of our most popular offerings last year. If you’re having a family event anytime between January 19th and the end of March (especially if it’s an event with any kind of healthy or physical activity focus), then our HSK program can make that event even better with great giveaways for your parents.

Each family packet will include free samples of healthier family products as well as a copy of our “Thrive” mini-mag with great tips for healthier families and even more coupons and special offers for your parents. So many PTO and PTA groups these days are putting a greater emphasis on healthy living, whether it’s educating the kids on food choices, or emphasizing physical fitness, or holding fun, active family events as alternatives to TV watching. Our Healthy School Kids program is a perfect addition to those efforts. Hope your group and your parents can take advantage. (Note: Quantities are limited, so be sure to sign up right away.)

That link again is http://www.ptotoday.com/healthy-school-kids-samples.

OK, we’re three months into the school year. How are you doing personally, PTO-wise?

It’s around this time each year when we start hearing a lot more about burnout and frustration. Where are you on that front?

It’s certainly important for your own well-being to try to keep things sane, but you may not realize how important it is for your group that you do so. One of your goals as a leader is to bring in more volunteers and help them move up into leadership positions over time. The trouble is, though, if you’re completely stressed out and frustrated in your current job, then: 1) it’s usually obvious; and 2) no one is going to want to join you. Here’s a great article on leaders and stress and balance.

My advice if you’re feeling that stress is to remember two key letters: n-o. It’s OK for you to say no to a request. And it’s OK for your PTO to say no to an event or effort. The best leaders and the best groups select a realistic number of tasks and then do them really, really well. Stretch too thin and the leader gets burned out, and the activities won’t be that good, either — a real recipe for long-term decline.

It’s empowering to say no and then see that the walls don’t fall down and the world doesn’t stop spinning. We need leaders who enjoy the job and can do a great job. That’s how PTOs and PTAs thrive for the long term. How are you and your group doing with that this year?

Finally, has your group learned to say no or made good progress on the sanity front (or both)? Jump into our Facebook conversation on that topic to share how.

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.

As you know, it doesn’t take much for parents to talk themselves out of attending your events or getting involved at school.  A new obstacle I started seeing last year was flu fears canceling or hurting PTO and PTA family events. Ugh.

A few thoughts on this:

1. Has this been a factor at all with your group? I’ve been looking for groups that were affected last year by this fear or that have put good practices in place to combat it. Would love your feedback on our message boards.
2. I’ve always felt that it’s best to address fears like this head on (even if you think they’re overblown). If you’re hearing talk among your parents, take steps to help. Maybe get hand sanitizer for all your events (and announce that you have it), or have a clean-up crew disinfect all the tables before your spaghetti supper (and announce that they’ve done it). Providing info on how parents can keep their kids and families healthy is another good service.
3. Finally, we’ve been hearing of more and more groups that have “healthy kids” as a focus or even as a new committee. If your group is getting more into this topic, we’ve just created a section on PTO Today with specific content and special offerings just for you. Check it out and sign up to become a Healthy School Kids group. It’s a good resource now, and with all the interest around this topic, I’m sure it’s going to get better and better in the months ahead. By signing up, we’ll keep you in the loop on new offerings.

Good luck in all your work!