Our PTO subscribed to Constant Contact this year. It cost about $125 (that's the annual prepaid education/nonprofit rate) to store up to 500 e-mail addresses and send an unlimited number of e-mails per month. Right now we have 258 addresses (for a school with 320 students/250 families) stored. The list was populated from the e-mail addresses supplied by parents when they completed forms for the school directory, plus staff e-mail addresses. I've shared the login/password with the rest of the PTO officers and with the principal, so they can use it as well.

While we also have a Yahoo account for everyday PTO mail, Constant Contact is nice because it automates subscribe/unsubscribe and all the other stuff to comply with CAN/SPAM regulations. We even got a sign-up box to put on our Web site. They have templates for e-mails of different types and themes, which are nice. Still, I set up the HTML template for our PTO newsletter myself because I wanted a more customized look.

Response has been very positive -- parents like getting newsletters, etc., in their in-boxes instead of hunting (sometimes in vain) through their kids' backpacks. It's also cut down on our use of paper and toner at school. We used to print 320 copies of our newsletter every two weeks; now that's down to 75 (for those who don't have e-mail)!

Our PTA/PTSA's seem to respond GREAT to emails and email newsletters. All three of my students' schools offer a weekly email newsletter which is excellent for time sensitive information. We can include hyperlinks to forms or news articles on our websites and provide email links to chairpeople who are seeking out volunteers, donated items or other responses.

We keep our email addresses in an excel format for easy additions, deletions or changes and ask families if they would like to join on membership, volunteer and other forms.

It's 2007 -- and it's a busy world. Can't imagine organizing events and activities without email.

Besides mass e-mails,we also get a small section of the school weekly newsletter just for PTO news. Our Principal is awesome and she does everything she can to help us!

W

we aslo have a 'REMOVE FROM DISTRIB LIST"link at the bottom of each mass email, if anyone changes there mind and no longer want the info, but put themselves on the master list at year start.

Our parents were asked for e-mail addresses to be given on their Membership forms and we do send out mass information e-mails to them. So far it has been successful. We only send important info about upcoming events and what we are in need of...example..volunteers, donations(non cash), and ask parents for their resources we could use for up coming events. The replies have been phenomenal and we ask for donations before events and before we shop and save unbelievable amounts of money! It has been our experience that a large portion our involved parents are more willing to be involved if not being tied up on the phone or having to listen to their phone messages. We do an 'alert' also which is an automated phone calling system that goes out to all our parents in the entire school for the especially large events. This of course is the school's system that we are allowed to have the principal use on our behalf.