It sort of sounds like all of you are in schools that use the web and email for most of their communication which is great, my school is just not at that point and when I truly tried to do most of our group 'stuff' email I noticed a huge amount of families that were not being connected to the group at all.
Believe it or not our district just made staff email address accessible to families, just this month...that has been a long time(years) in the making! Now it is trying to get that word out.
Our old principal who left last month tried to do the contacting with families and he only had about 25 families send in their email addresses. Guess we aren't hightech like everyone else...oh it would be nice if we were!

sending home weekly notices (by principal) about events has INCREASED the staff and pto time by no one haveing to copy and distribute flyers .
it was a major waste of time and trees, to always copy each newsletter 800 times.
a few hard copies are always available for those who dont have computers or internet connections. no discrimination there.
the emails dont replace phone or face to face, they are just much more efficient at getting the word out to parents and saves time and money, which in turn helps our kids by letting us spend the savings elsewhere, more productively.
email has downsides too, but its like all things in life, nothing is perfect, and the future IS computers, and not flyers stuffing the kids cubbies, whether you like it or not, think its impersonal or not, thats probably the path most districts will take one day or another, becuase its driven by economics.
and districts love to save money. getting more volunteers involved is all secondary (to the admin), even tho it has helped communication and therefor involvement, its driven by money/time primarly, these changes.

Our PTO uses Yahoo Groups (you can also go with Google Groups) to manage our email list. All parents opt-in and only three people have access to the email addresses. The advantage to using one of these services is that the email goes out to the entire group and individual addresses are never displayed. Our members can also go online to the group to see old messages.

If you choose to go this route, just make sure that access is limited to very few, tech-savvy folks. Passwords should not be shared and you should discuss which options to turn on or off. For example, we do not allow members to post messages (possible spam or negative emails) or view member lists. If a member replies to the email, only the moderators/owners view the reply. This is helpful when we ask for volunteers and just let parents know that they can hit reply to let us know their availability.

Finally, we have not done away with paper communication, phone calls or talking one-on-one. This is just another way to communicate with parents that do use email regularly. It has really enhanced participation and we have lots of happy parents because they get info on what is happening on a weekly basis.

pals;137282 wrote: TIM! I am surprised at you! I will be the first to admit that email is so easy to rely on, I also will be the first to admit that I have relied very heavy on it until I learned my lesson.
My lesson...is that sending email is not as personal as that face to face, or phone call. It is something that even though parents may sign up for they may not actually check it for weeks...this is common! I was amazed by that because I am on my computer daily! Also believe it or not parents may not even know how to use email-yes I have heard that as well.
I became very dependent on email until last spring when I realized that it was not the best way to go. We do our minutes home to all parents, updates, volunteer requests, all of that on paper. We do have info on our web page, and I still do email reminders BUT I am no longer dependent on them, if a person signed up to volunteer I either call or send a note home, thank yous are always a personal touch.
If it works for your group great but please be caution that there may be down sides to it...I never would have guessed!

Hmmm... I don't know, pals, to me it's all about results and what we're hearing from parents.

Our school may be a bit different in that the principal about two years ago made a commitment to communicating with the web. Lunch menus, forms, schedules, more -- all those are only available on the web. Not PTO stuff -- school stuff.

Result has been that 99% of parents have email on record and parents were used to web/email as virtually required habit before parent group went full bore. Because of the principal's actions, our school is likely ahead of the curve on parents being used to checking email.

Labor-wise and cost-wise (no paper, no collating, no getting to teachers and having teachers pass out), it's a huge difference. Has allowed us to do more communicating. And -- perhaps to your point -- we try to be very careful and personal. Email doesn't have to be as cold as it sometimes sounds when not used really well. It'll never be me driving over to someone's house and shaking their hand, but.... (the downside of the all-personal approach is that it often winds up with a parent group only connecting with those who are available personally).

PTO Manager helps us leader-types to email selected groups with more personal messages.

I think email is significantly more accepted/common today than it was three years ago and will be even moreso next year and the year after.

I hear your concern (and it is a downside to be watched out for if your email becomes very rote and impersonal), but I can say with big-time confidence that email has helped us grow involvement and that parents feel like communication is better these days.

TIM! I am surprised at you! I will be the first to admit that email is so easy to rely on, I also will be the first to admit that I have relied very heavy on it until I learned my lesson.
My lesson...is that sending email is not as personal as that face to face, or phone call. It is something that even though parents may sign up for they may not actually check it for weeks...this is common! I was amazed by that because I am on my computer daily! Also believe it or not parents may not even know how to use email-yes I have heard that as well.
I became very dependent on email until last spring when I realized that it was not the best way to go. We do our minutes home to all parents, updates, volunteer requests, all of that on paper. We do have info on our web page, and I still do email reminders BUT I am no longer dependent on them, if a person signed up to volunteer I either call or send a note home, thank yous are always a personal touch.
If it works for your group great but please be caution that there may be down sides to it...I never would have guessed!

I now have about 300 PTO members. I have 175 that have email addresses, so if you just use email, which is much easier to use, you give up the opportunity to reach the others. I created my own email distribution list from exports out of my membership database in Excel.

Last year, based on lower volunteerism, I decided that this year we needed more help. The best way to get more help is to ask more people.

I will say that I can afford to email 2-3 times as often as I can afford to mail.

So far this year, I've sent 1 1/2 mails(half when all the membership forms were not back yet) and 3 emails.

I also use BCC. Only a trusted few get access to the e-mail list.

I've seen too many people share their friend names with others in ways that can cause them to get spam.

When I send an email, I send it to Myself and BCC the entire membership.

I know that most parents

1) Don't have time to attend meetings and accept that this is ok.
2) Parent would rather volunteer at an event rather than come to a meeting about an event. I accept this too.

There is an interesting phenomenom that I have not figured out yet.

A disproportionate number of my volunteers are coming from people that have email, rather than don't.

Here's the real value in considering the approach to communicating in more than one method.... The newly elected treasurer does not have email.

I am working towards getting tied into the phone messenger system the school has. It makes outbound calls to up to 800-900 parent in about 2 days, during acceptible hours.

Hope this helps.