SmittyPTSO - No problem. There are so many great tools available to help groups get things done. Technology certainly makes things easier.

Efundraising- thanks for the google survey idea- I don't know why we didn't think of that before -- we used Google Sites to do our website!

We just did a survey last week. We have it on surveymonkey.com , since we get complaints about wasting paper. We have a link tot he survey on our facebook page, in our newsletter and on our school website. It tabulates all of the responses for us.
There are things that the regular volunteers just assume everyone else knows about the PTA, so i think it is good to get a feel for that.

Doing a survey is a great idea. So is doing a regular newsletter. One thing you may want to do to increase participation in your survey is to keep it as brief as possible. You can always do follow up questionnaires for people who are interested in volunteering.

You can use Google Docs to create an email survey for free, if you are interested in going that route. I have written up instructions for businesses to do this here - allbizanswers.com/how-to-use-google-docs...end-a-simple-survey/ - but you can apply the same steps for your parent group survey.

Lisa thanks for posting the links .

Sarah ,

If you look in the file exchange you will find a lot of useful forms like the 2 hour power letter and survey . Survey for teacher week and lots of helpful tools .
It is great and the best part is it makes thing so easy and a good bit of the work is already done .

Thanks for the great advice, PTO Mommy!

Sarah- Here is a link to the 2-hour Power -- it's a way of encouraging people to volunteer for just 2 hours. It gets people jump started to get into the volunteer cycle.

Also, here's an article that you may find helpful in crafting a mission statement and some sample mission statements from our file exchange .

Good Luck,

~Lisa


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