Welcome back, PTA Volunteers– I’m so excited to start this year with all of you, and I can’t wait to see what we can accomplish this year. As Communications VP for SMMPTA Council, my goal is to provide training and support for Communications Leadership within the Unit PTAs that serve SMMUSD schools.
Your role as a Communications officer is to strengthen our community engagement by delivering clear, concise, & relevant messaging from our school administration and PTA leadership, to our parent community. If you are new to the role, below you will find some of my technology recommendations, training videos and answers to some frequently asked questions.
Email Newsletters
Your school’s weekly newsletter is intended to be a weekly digest of the upcoming week’s events and announcements. Ideal content for this newsletter are Messages from your Principal, Event Reminders & Save the Dates, Committee Meeting times & Zoom links, Fundraising opportunities, Volunteer opportunities, etc. These posts should be abbreviated versions of your PTA webpage, so keeping text short and linking to pages or flyers with full details is recommended.
Your email list
Your Unit PTA may already have a list of previous year’s emails of parent membership from your school. If approved, your Principal or District office may also provide a current list at the start of the school year upon request. These lists must be tagged or kept separate, as certain emails may be appropriate for membership only, and some may be for school-wide communication. Email lists may not be shared or distributed outside of your Unit’s Communications team, and all emails sent must be for PTA business or School administration approved messaging.
Campaign Management Platform
An email campaign management platform is highly recommended. Most free email services will be flagged as a spam account if you attempt to send emails out to hundreds of recipients. There are many free options for subscriber lists less than 1,000, and options for paid subscriptions for additional subscribers. Here is a non-exhaustive list of some options that offer free basic plans. My personal recommendation is MailerLite, as it is very streamlined and minimal, without a bunch of data tracking bells & whistles, which is not a priority for our uses in PTA.
Getting Started with your Email Campaign Management Software
I will be hosting a few MailerLite workshops that focus on our specific uses of the app, at the start of the school year, and will be available for one-on-one support conferences as needed. Don’t hesitate to reach out: smmptas@gmail.com
Here is a tutorial video from MailerLite to get you started:
PTA Website
Your Unit PTA’s website is intended to be the main hub of information for all things at your local site. While the email newsletter contains all the newest information week-to-week in digestible bits, the website houses full event details, parent resources, and other ongoing information.
Why is there a SMMUSD Website and PTA Website? The SMMUSD School Site website is a District-run website that houses the most up-to-date information for all things administrative, including enrollment, lunch menus, and District sponsored activities. Your Unit PTA website is a parent-volunteer run hub of information for our community and PTA sponsored events. It is very flexible, updates frequently, and information is curated based on feedback from your local parents, your community!
The Unit PTA website houses your Unit’s PTA Calendar, which is easily updated by your Communications team, and includes important meetings, school closures, and planned events.
We don't have a website yet, how do we get one started?
There are many website creation services out there with varying levels of flexibility and cost. My personal recommendation is WordPress. While it may be difficult to set up for an inexperienced website admin, it offers flexibility, security and is easy to learn basic editing of webpages. A basic website can be set up for free, with optional paid add-ons for ecommerce and more complex website design capabilities. WordPress’ plugin options allow for a website that can grow and scale with your Unit’s individual needs. Website administration can be shared or passed to the next officer easily as well. I am available for one-on-one website support conferences for PTA Communications Leads as needed. Please contact me below!
Best Practices
- Establish a schedule for when you will send emails, weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.
- Be cautious of including information further out than your next email. Too much repeating information week to week, may signal to your audience that your entire email is a duplicate, and it may be difficult to discern what info is new.
- This doesn’t mean you can’t have information that repeats. Big Events may need a couple weeks exposure to initiate a call to action.
- Understand that all your channels of communication have differing use benefits. For example, Social Media is ideal for short, image-anchored bits of sharable information; While a website blogpost is ideal for text-heavy content. School-wide email newsletter is ideal for time-sensitive general announcements, while your Room Reps are best at communicating class or grade-specific events.
Helpful Tools
Here are some of my favorite web tools. I am not affiliated or compensated by any of these companies, I just find them very useful in my Communications volunteer work.
- Image Resizer – Reduce the size of your images to keep your website and emails loading fast. 1200px (pixels) wide is satisfactory for a full screen image; 300px square for a thumbnail or profile pic; 650px wide for an inline image with text.
- QR Code Monkey – Make a QR code! QR codes are ideal for print materials (printed flyers, event banners, etc.) QR codes are computer-readable text that can lead to an existing webpage. Place a QR code on an event banner and your smartphone camera can read a QR code and bring you to a website to buy tickets, without having to type in the web address. Just like clicking a hyperlink, but in the physical world!
- MailerLite – Email campaign managers are great for Room Reps too! The free version is good for up to 1,000 subscribers. Create a template that you can easily duplicate weekly or monthly, depending on your update calendar.
- Proton Mail – Free end-to-end (e2e) encrypted email account, plus Drive storage– a Gmail alternative, for those with an interest in data privacy.
Trinedy Krusell
1st VP of Communications, 2022-23
Santa Monica-Malibu Council of PTAs
news@smmpta.org
