We started using PTO manager this year. It is worth every penny. The email system they have for communication is awsome! We have had so many compliments from parents on the new system. If you can spend the money, I say go for it!

I have found that Google Groups and Yahoo Groups work very well for communications with a large group and would recommend a combination of paper and electronic communications. I have a slight preference for Google Groups, but both have a lot of features.

Sending information electronically can really boost how many people you get to. Conventional email (i.e., paste in all the addresses) can be a problem because of provider limitations in place to limit spam. For instance our current provider won't process a message to more than 50 recipients, meaning a message has to be chopped into multiple emails for a large group. But using Google Group or Yahoo Group takes care of that. Plus there are lots of other features that can be helpful.

We use Google Groups with much success. Parents can either join directly or can complete a form and our coordinator adds their email addresses. We send out a weekly update. Forms and flyers are posted on our website and we provide links to them. We also have a Gmail (Google) address that we all use to send emails as well as receiving inquiries from parents and teachers.

I use gmail. I don't bother to populate all the fields, I just copy from my excel sheet everyone's email address and paste them in the to field the first time, then gmail asks me if I want to add them to my address book.

I do that, then I create my groups for various things, like those who've said they will bake, ect.

I give gmail access to the board and they can all log in and send messages to from "This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.".

This has been helpful, because when chairs or board members would spam the group asking for help, often the person didn't know who the emailing person was and would often ignore it.

For volunteers, it's definately helpful to send out the emails. For other things though, the flyers are better, as we don't maintain emails on the whole school, only our membership, and most of our fundraising and family fun things need to go to everyone.

No, flyers get a better return, but we're trying to reduce our paper use. We're still "training" our parents.

Have any of you had experience with using Yahoo or Google groups or another email management system? If so, do you find it gets a better "return" than sending home flyers?

Thanks!