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.
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.