As fall is a traditional time to start the big school fundraiser, and as fundraising is sometimes a stressful endeavour, we thought we would share some tips to alleviate the stress of your fundraising this year.

1. Review All of the Details

As you get ready to launch the fall fundraiser, make sure you have all of your dates and details in place. Also, be sure to double-check with the fundraising company, verifying that they have the same dates and details.

2. Allow Enough Time

Starting your fundraiser early gives you plenty of time to get the product handed out before the holidays. Don’t try to squeeze your fundraiser into a small time window. If you want delivery before Thanksgiving or before Christmas, schedule it for two weeks before vacation so any loose ends don’t ruin your holiday.

3. Recruit Volunteers Early and Often

You are going to want people by your side for some of the tasks of fundraising, such as the product hand out day. Start asking early so you are sure to have enough people on board. Also, it is always better to have too many volunteers, rather than too few.

4. Prepare Reminders

A note sent home at a key point in the fundraiser can help things go more smoothly. Consider sending reminders that the fundraiser is starting, that the orders are due in, and that the pick up date is approaching.

5. Double-check the Availability of Your Distribution Room

Make sure the office AND the custodial staff knows what room you need, how long you need it, what time the truck is coming in, etc. Nothing adds to stress like not having a room available when you clearly remember requesting it. Just to be safe, double-check.

6. Clear Your Day

Delivery day can get hectic without a little pre-planning. Make sure you have help in place to watch your kids and don’t try to fit extra stuff in on that day. When possible, schedule the distribution around your schedule so you are not getting overwhelmed.

7. Communicate

The more your communicate, the lower your stress will be. Remind parents every way you can about the order pick up; notes home, email, phone, Facebook, etc. If you don’t have an email list, start one at this year’s open house.

8. Double-Check Delivery Details

If you haven’t received delivery confirmation from your fundraising provider a few days before delivery, call them. It always pays to double-check details so that nothing goes wrong.

9. If You Haven’t Finalized the Fundraiser, Do it Now.

There is still time to plan and execute a successful fundraiser, but the longer you wait, the harder it will be.

10. Work with Stevco

If you are working with us for this year’s fall fundraiser, you can rest easy in our promise to make your fundraiser easy. We eliminate stress with our added services and personal attention. If you aren’t working with us this fall, follow the steps we’ve provided above, and give us a call for your Spring fundraiser (you should start planning for that now, by the way.)

One of the key building blocks for better participation in your parent group is communication. Plain and simple, good communication matters.

A Little Communication Goes a Long Way

Spending a little time focusing on improving your communication efforts can really help your parent group get more participation. We’ll talk more in a later article about what you should be talking about, but in this article lets focus on the systems that you can use to communicate better with your school community.

First of all, you should be using the internet to communicate. It is fast, it is easy, and its mostly free.

Build an Email List

Every parent group should have an email list of all the school parents. You can build this list over time at open houses and events. Be proactive in getting emails and explain that it is a primary means of communicating about issues that effect their children.

Once you have a list, send out regular emails. We use MailChimp to send out our emails and we really like the service. Plus, it can be free if you have less than 500 email addresses.

Your emails don’t have to be fancy. They should be direct and to the point and should share important information. Try to keep parents “in the know.”

Get a Website

Beyond email, you may want to start a website or blog where you can post information for people to view.

Be More Social (Online)

Another important area of communication is online social networks. It would be a good idea to start a Facebook page for your parent group. You may also want to start a Twitter account. This is another way to stay in touch with your community.

Communicate Within Your Organization

Finally, you may need a more targetted means of communication. There is a web service called MemberHub which allows you to communicate with your group members via an online interface, email, and even text messaging. You can set up separate hubs for the different committees in your group, and have a main communication hub for every parent in your school.

Use the Tools

Once you have the right tools, it it just about using them. Practice makes perfect. Just make it your goal to better communicate with parents and to learn the new tools of communication that will help you build a more involved group.

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photo credit: Milestoned

This is part of a series of posts on the importance of communication at your parent group. Good communication can help your group get much more accomplished and can help everyone to have a better school experience.

If you want a strong parent group with a lot of interaction, you need to use communication tools and develop a habit of regular communication. So much hinges on the second part of that statement. Tools are easy to find and use, but if you don’t have a commitment to regular communication, it won’t happen.

Keep the conversation running all year long by sending out short bits of information. Rather than a few big newsletter issues a year, send out bi-weekly emails. Between what your group is doing and general school news and announcements, you should have plenty to talk about. Its okay to get in touch with parents on a regular basis, as long as you are providing useful information in small, digestible, bites.

Email

Do you have an email list for your parents? Do you use it? And don’t tell me you don’t use it because you have parents that don’t have email. While that is always true, a large percentage of your parents do use email. And for those that don’t, you can develop alternate ways of communicating.

Email is a very easy way to stay in touch. Consider sending out an email every other week. Send out information, resources, highlights, and more. To start using email, you are going to need to collect parents’ email addresses for your list. You can do this at registration and at events all year long. If you have a web site, create a sign up form for your email newsletter. If you don’t have a web site you should get one.

To manage email better, your group should use an email management software. This will only cost around $10 per month, but save a lot of headache and make regular communication far easier. There are lots of providers out there, but for ease of use I highly recommend MailChimp, which offers free starter accounts.

Social Media

You may want to consider using sites like Facebook and Twitter to stay in contact. Only do this if you already have a decent number of parents using these services. Facebook, especially, is very popular amongst regular moms and dads. You may want to set up a Facebook page. If you have no idea how to do that, enlist one of your parents who regularly uses Facebook. If that fails, there must be a teenager nearby who could get roped into it.

Treat Facebook and Twitter as a news service. The more regularly you update it with interesting information, the better. And its okay to post the same information more than once, especially on Twitter. Not every message is going to get read the first time around.

Don’t rely on social media as your primary means of communication. Instead, it can supplement and add a layer of communication to your efforts.

MemberHub

Sometimes, you need to communicate with a group of people all at once. You may have an event committee, or maybe you want to keep your executive board all on the same page. You could all email and call each other back in forth. But there is a simple tool that can make group communication very easy for you. Its called MemberHub. With this tool, you can have discussions that will be sent to email, but also recorded in a linear fashion so anyone can catch up on the conversation. You can share calendars, documents, files, and more. You can even use it to send out important announcements vie email and text message. All in all, it is a very simple and easy to use group collaboration and organization tool.

With the right tools and a commitment to use them to communicate more often and more clearly, you can really build your sense of community at your school. Everyone likes being “in the know.” Facilitate this be spreading information about your group and school far and wide.

For schools looking for more ways to add incremental funding, consider Coke rewards for schools.  This program works much like box tops or labels for education. Parents donate their Coke rewards to the school.

Your school will need to appoint a coordinator who will set up an account for your school. From there, you simply need to encourage parents to donate their points and redeem the rewards.

Coke has lots of rewards to choose from, including many PE related items. This could be a great way to stock up on extra balls and fun equipment for your school’s gym classes.

Learn more about Coke rewards for schools by visiting http://www.mycokerewards.com/mcrSchools.do?d=2&WT.mc_id=SOURCEREG:SCHPTO3