There are several different price points, as there are two modules (volunteer builder and finance manager -- discount if buy both together), as well as discounts for groups that belong to PTO Today Plus.
But as a ballpark figure, the Volunteer Builder program costs just $199 per year and the Finance Manager program costs just $99 per year. Discounts take it down from there.
Email is a preferred way to receive communication by many parents. I spend much of my day on computers and responding to emails. Does anyone know how much the PTO Manager Software costs for a school group?
I set up a Yahoo Group for our whole school last year. It is set up only for mailings, so it is not a "discussion" group. No one can post or send out e-mails to the group--just the administrator (which is still me!). You can simply ADD the e-mail addresses (you don't have to wait for them to join the group) although they have a limit of 10 per day that you can add. It has worked fine for our use. We mail out the weekly school newsletter plus one other mail-out of small reminders at the beginning of the week.
The hard part with Yahoo Groups is that I can't arrange the address book by alphabetical order. In other words, if my name is Sue Jones and my e-mail is This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., it alphabetizes the list according to "snazzymom" and not Jones. That makes it hard to find someone's e-mail address when I'm looking for it. Hope that makes sense.
It has been wonderful for our school. People would have a fit if we stopped it. Good luck!
SHC
I do an email to about 500 families every week. We ask for email addresses when we do our student directory. I take the email addresses and put them in 8 separate distribution lists (a-c, d-f, etc.) so it doesn't look like spam when I send out the mails. Our group has its own email address using my mail account.
When I send out my emails, I put the first distribution list in the "bcc" line of the header so that the list is private to everyone who gets it. I then resend the message 7 more times, each time with the next distribution list. It is quick, easy and works really well. Every year I just print out the distribution lists and edit it with new addresses.
This is yet another nice feature of our PTO Manager software. You can mail to all folks at your school (once they're entered) and/or you can mail to any subset.
Examples:
1. Mail a bi-weekly PTO update to whole list.
2. Mail a project update just to those involved with that project.
3. Mail a program update just to the parents of the grade affected. (need chaperones for the 4th grade field trip? just email the 4th grade parents.)
You know I should do that. I've done it before but not in outlook. I had such trouble with my carrier (adelphia) that once I got to a place that worked I stopped going further. Thanks for the tip....d
