I opened up a free hotmail account for our parent group (tip: don't use hotmail - waaay too much disgusting spam - yahoo or iVillage may be better for a freebie account).
We have had limited success using e-mail to reach the entire school (only 40 families are signed up) and rely on paper.
However it is a requirement for our lead group (officers) parents.
(One click sure beats making 20 phone calls!!)
And I do make it very clear, that the e-mail is for school business only - no funny jokes, no chain letters, political agendas, etc.
I have also added local business e-mails, as well as the school board member e-mails and DON't FORGET the other elementary PTOs that are in your area. WE support each other via e-mail sometimes!!
It's a great advertising tool, when we have events open to the public.
Anyone want to share their success on this project. I have a friend in a nearby community that includes me on her email list and it seems to be very informative and successfull!
We just started this year e-mailing parents, etc. On our membership forms, we noted that if they would like to get e-mails from the PTO put down your e-mail address. I as president do the e-mailing since everything has to come to me for approval. We also send out a hard copy with each student, because some people may go weeks without checking their e-mail. Hope this helps.
One thing that has worked somewhat for us is to use Yahoo Groups and set up a group. I use it to send out reminders mostly...any events that are upcoming, the system automatically sends a reminder...you do need to set up a calendar & how often you want the reminders, but it's fairly simple. One thing I have found is that not all the parents that said they wanted to be on the list joined the list. Anyone is able to post & it's been a little quiet lately, so maybe I need to start up some conversation [img]smile.gif[/img]
If you have any questions, please feel free to email me!
We want to leverage e-mail more as a communication vehicle. However, managing a centralized list of e-mail addresses for parents and teachers is somewhat of a challenge.
Different people need to be able to send to the list. Then there is the issue of families that aren't on e-mail. When a communication is sent out, we need to send them a hardcopy. The trick is knowing who we need to send a hardcopy.
Any advice or success stories? Anybody out there in the same boat?
