May I suggest that you run your meeting with some of the time devoted to business and some of the time devoted to a talk concentrating on a topic that might be of particular concern in your community right now. You can use your local newspaper or community cable access tv station to publicize the speaker and even invite the community at large.
His main point: don't confuse number of attendees with how much involvement you have in your parent group. A lot of parents can't (or don't want to ; ) attend meetings but they are willing to help out at events and/or with projects.
It's funny that we ALL ask this same question. The answer? WHO KNOWS!! I think if we combine all of us, we could probably say we have tried it all. With that said, I read an article by Tim Sullivan (I think, it was a PTO Today enewsletter) that said: it doesn't matter how many you have there, it's the involvement of those that are there. So true!! When I read that, I found that I don't stress at the meetings nearly as much. If we have the same people on the same committees...that's ok. We all know what we need to do and how we can get it done. I thank my small group! And it seems we draw a few more in every couple of months because we are out there DOING SOMETHING.
It sounds too simple to work but we started serving dinner. It is a Pot Luck style with a salad and we have tripled our attendance. We still have the meeting at school to keep it professional, and we made a rule that it is under 1 hour ~ no exceptions. If we get bogged down on an issue or start veering off course we set a different meeting to decide details. Good luck!
Communication is the key, sending email newsletters is the best way. Try getting the parents email address, that way it gets to them directly.
there are email marketing websites that help you with this.
This is my first year as President and our board made it a priority this year to bring in as many new parents as we could. We started by reducing our general meetings from monthly to 3 - fall, winter, and spring. We heavily publicized them with emails, newsletters, blog, and a sign by the drop off/pick up site.
We also added a raffle prize for those parents attending the meetings. The prize is something geared toward the whole family (i.e., movie tickets, hockey tickets, etc.). The day of the meeting, the teachers hype up the meeting and especially the raffle prize. It's amazing how many parents show up because their kids want the prize!
Our meeting attendance has gone from 3-4 people to 30+. Hopefully, we can keep it up!
