Also, may I suggest that your request for email address - indicate the home email address and the work email address. That way, people can get the communication at work too - and stay informed that way.
I know that many of the families in this area (Dallas Fort Worth), use their work email address for communication from school and PTA - because when they get home - they would rather not even bother with a computer or emails since they deal with them all day at work.
We just started an email group at Yahoogroups this year. I did a voluteer survey at the beginning of the year and about 60% of them listed an email addy. Most people around here don't use email as a wonderful tool of communication yet. Lots of people don't check their email very often but quite a few use it as much as I do. [img]smile.gif[/img] I chose to "invite" people to our group as opposed to automatically signing them up because I didn't want to abuse the information they gave me. We have only had about 22 people sign up for the list in the 3 weeks it's been going. But they way I see it is that it only took me about an hour to set the whole thing up and issue invitations, etc. I use it as another form of communication for announcements, reminders and thank you's. The two times I've requested a little help with something I've had several people email me offering help.
Another nice thing is that I have many email addresses for DADS. I had two spots on our form for parents to list names, emails and other information. Typically, we get the mom's info. and that's it. Now we have quite a few Dad's on the list and even though I'm not hearing from them, I know that they are included and not left out. Slowly but surely, maybe I can reel them in!
We will be starting an egroup this year...we added the email address onto our emergency contact form, and have found that the majority of parents have readily supplied their information. We hope to decrease significantly our paper output, and it alleviates the loss of papers in the backpacks!
Thanks Tina. Good point about only as good as the users. I live in a rural area in Michigan and need to remember that I am possibly more "connected" than some. But I think most people in the area probably have email. Possibly a survery of our parents is in order?
I'm just trying to come up with a way to facilitate conversation between meetings. Most of our moms work outside the home and at varying shifts so we generally play at lot of answering maching tag, which I HATE!
Egroups work great! We are an expatriate community in Venezuela and use several egroups through Yahoo. One is for the general community to transmit information about local events, political crisis, etc...We have one just for our school and it allows us to send out our weekly newsletter, information on upcoming events, schedule changes due to the political scene, etc... Remember it is only as good as the users. Our users tend to rely heavily on the internet for communication, would yours?
Hi, I'm new to PTO and this site, finding some great info though! Thanks
I'm considering suggesting to my PTO that we start an email group. Something on Yahoo or MSN. I was wondering if any of you have used this medium to increase communication with the PTO members.
In case I'm not being clear, an egroup is basically a platform for email to be sent to all members of the group from one address.
We are trying to increase parent involvement (isn't everyone? lol) and I was thinking that this might be a way for people who are unable to come to the meetings to still be informed of the happenings and the need for volunteers.
Just wondering if anyone else has tried and this how it worked.
