Oops...I sure did mean $12,000.

Hi Joy - did you mean your budget was $12,000? Because $500 out of $1200 is quite a large percentage

We have about 400 students and 65 faculty/staff members, so each of our flyers requires about a ream of paper to cover everyone. We prefer to use the neon colored paper which runs us about $13 a ream. (you could go white or pastel colors and spend less money). The amount of paper you would need of course will depend on the number of students/faculty you have.

This year we did:
welcome letter to parents at the beginning of the year: $13.00
monthly newsletters: $117.00
class specific membership reminders: $26.00
brochures: $13.00 (will double for next year)
volunteer forms: $13.00
PTA membership envelopes: $8.00
posters/display boards: $15-20
candy for back-to-school night membership table: $10.00
door prize tickets: $2.00
door prizes: donated
pizza drive supplies: $25-30
pizza: currently around $300
TOTAL: $552.00

Our budget this year was around $1200.00 so this was really a minimal percentage.

We currently have a 125% membership increase over where we were last year. The thing that really has made an impact on increasing our membership is to keep focusing on adding new members throughout the year. So many groups kick off with a membership drive in the fall and that's it. We did a pizza contest to promote membership this year. Each student received a (paper) slice of pizza when a family member joined the PTA that they added to their class pizza. When the pizza was complete (100% classroom membership) the class won a pizza party. We have been continuing to promote this during the year by encouraging students, sending home reminders and announcing at general body meetings. Each of our meetings has a different grade level of students performing so we have a targeted grade level to focus on each month. Out of 20 classes so far 10 have won their pizza parties. We have 1 month of school left and just sent out some more contest reminders and have new memberships trickling in daily.

The other thing that has helped us increase our volunteers & members was to increase our visibility and make sure that people know we are here and know what we are doing for our school & families. We use our newsletter to highlight events and things we have provided to students & the school. The more people see you doing the more they will want to be a part of your organization. We also created a facebook page & twitter account and are working on a website. We set up tables during parent-teacher conferences, back to school night, kindergarten registration & orientation...anywhere parents were going so that they had a chance to join or ask questions. We also used our principal to send out edconnect calls to all of the parents reminding parents of events and had the school librarian add announcements and events to the school's blog.

Hope that helps some.

Can you suggest approximately how much you spend per year on all this? If not as a dollar amount, but as a percent of your annual budget?

We add all the cost of paper for the year into our operating expense budget so I'm not sure how much of it really went into recruitment/marketing but if you can plan out different flyers you would like to send out during the year you could probably come pretty close and then maybe budget a little over that amount.

We pushed really hard to build membership so we sent out a lot of papers. We created PTA brochures and for next year I will plan on printing at least twice as many brochures as we have students. We also sent out membership info and volunteer forms multiple times throughout the year so we will plan to at least send out 4 a year per student. Those are not including our monthly newsletters which also help with recruiting new members and volunteers because it lets them know what you are doing as a group.

We did prize drawings at each of our meetings to encourage people to become members but we had them all donated. Local businesses were happy to help, some were donated by board members and this month we are using some of the samples we received from fundraising reps.

Hi Everyone,

First time poster here. I'm the current Secretary of our elementary school district PTO, and will probably be in the President's seat come next month. I'm making a list of things that I want to accomplish over the next academic year, and increasing awareness and parent involvement not only at the meetings, but in our PTO-sponsored events (in other words - volunteers!). Of course, this is everyone's goal, right ?

Our parent buy-in/awareness/participation/volunteering is very low, and must change!

My question is, how much money do you set aside each year to spend on this? To include, incentives at meetings (door prizes, etc?), printing costs of newsletters/brochures, setups/handouts at tables during PTO-sponsored events, t-shirts, etc. If you offer child care at meetings (which we do), please don't include this cost in your answer. Also, do not include direct costs incurred by your PTO to hold PTO-sponsored events - just the EXTRA you spend on getting NEW members and volunteers.

To start, we're at $750, but we actually spend around $200 of it. My sense is that we need to kick it up a notch and spend more to get more. I'd love to hear some input! It might be helpful to know that we spend a little under $30,000 (three elementary schools and 1200 students in the district our PTO is responsible for). So we spend less than 1% on what I think is more important...