However, when I actually find an instance of a PTO or a PTA doing something original and effective, I get really excited. And I want to write about it.

So, today, in the Hudson Hub Times Online, I found a short news blurb about an event the Hudson PTO held on November 9 and will hold again on November 16. Here is the blurb:

Have coffee with PTO

The Hudson PTO will offer all-new PTO Coffee Days at the Hudson Panera on Nov. 9 and 16 from 9:30 to 11 a.m. PTO members will answer questions, welcome feedback, and sign up existing Giant Eagle and Heinen’s Rewards cards in the PTO Rewards Program. In addition to rewards cards, visitors can learn how to support the Hudson schools by shopping online at favorite stores. They will learn how to get involved and details on upcoming PTO events and volunteer opportunities. For more information, call PTO President Becky Hinkle or visit www.HudsonPTO.org.

Wow. I love it! Here are a few things that really stand out to me.

1. The PTO is going to the people, rather than expecting people to come to them.

2. They are doing the work to sign people up for the grocery rewards cards, which is always an obstacle for people joining these programs.

3. They are giving people information about online shopping sites that will give the school rewards for referrals.

4. They will be having conversations with the public, which could lead to new friendships and collaborations.

5. They are driving business to Panera, which builds that relationship and will most likely lead to some kind of future donation to the school by the restaurant.

6. They are actively seeking volunteers. The atmosphere of a popular restaurant like Panera will give perspective volunteers the impression that this PTO is a fun, engaged, and active group. Way better than a school library!

7. They are doing the same event twice, so that people who miss it the first time, have another chance to participate.

Is your school’s PTO doing something radical like this? Or are you stuck, waiting for parents to show up to your school media center?

Come on! Take your show on the road! Go out and meet your parents where they are. Show them you are out in the world, too. Show them you like cool restaurants. Show them that the PTO is not a drag.

Photo by: Enokson

Well, if this is the case at your school (and I know that it is, because it’s the same all over), then I suggest you look at how you are inviting people to the meetings.

Now, I know that this isn’t the magic bullet solution to the overall problem of volunteer recruitment, but the way you ask people to join your cause is important.

And, I have to say that, as an example, my own children’s elementary school isn’t doing a very active job of recruiting us parents to get involved.

At our school, the PTO meets once per month. I know this because they advertise their meetings in the school newsletter, which I receive and actually read.

In fact, here is the blurb they included in the most recent newsletter home:

Our PTO meets next on Thursday, November 17, at 5:30. All are welcome to join us in our school library.

This wording is pretty typical for the announcement. As they said in that old television show, “Just the facts, ma’am.”

When I see this in the newsletter, there’s nothing that grabs my attention about the meeting or really encourages me to change my schedule to attend this meeting. I just keep skimming the newsletter looking for anything that really pertains to my own kids.

I have said over and over in this blog, that working for the school’s PTO is basically a sales job. It’s marketing. It’s convincing people to give up their time and money for a reason. If you want them to do it, you have to “SELL” it.

So, the newsletter blurb is a fine place to advertise the meeting, but you need to say much more than just the time and the place. Include what you’ll be talking about. Add some drama, and there’s always drama you can include. (Like, “We’ll be discussing the budget for field trips this coming year. If we don’t raise enough money, there will be no field trips all year!) Also, make sure you advertise that there will be food (preferably pie). Food is always a big draw, especially pie.

But then the PTO members have to personally invite people to attend. Each PTO member should make it a goal to invite four friends to each meeting. Get on the phone with them or stop them in the school hallway, and twist their arms.  Use your friendship to guilt them into coming.  Then those four should put the squeeze on a few more. And so on. Personal invitations are the best way to get people involved.

If a two-line, uninspired blurb in your school newsletter is all you do to invite parents to join your meetings, you don’t have any right to complain that not that many people show up week after week. You need pizzazz, excitement, drama, a call to action, and pie.

Photo by: Tracy Hunter

In this book, they list five attributes that separate successful entrepreneurs from unsuccessful ones. These characteristics are:

1. Character
2. Focus
3. Brand
4. Relationships
5. The Little Things

No matter what you think of Donald Trump, he has had a long and storied career as an entrepreneur, so it’s worth at least considering what he has to say on this matter.

I’ve stated many times before that I believe that school fundraising is a total sales job. You are trying to convince people to spend their money to buy a better product, namely a better school experience for their children. It doesn’t matter if you’re running an auction for your school, or a carnival, or a walk-a-thon. It could also be a product sale or a direct mail appeal. Whatever form your fundraiser takes, you are engaged in the art of sales.

Therefore, I think it’s appropriate to consider yourself an entrepreneur of a sort. You have to be creative, bold, and fearless when it comes to figuring out the best ways to earn the most money for your school.

So, if you are an entrepreneur, then, let’s look at the five markers of success that Trump and Kiyosaki highlight in their book.

1. Character. School fundraising is notoriously filled with “no’s”. You hear them all the time. It would be very easy to get discouraged and walk away from the effort of raising money in a school environment. I think it is especially frustrating because the cause itself is so important- their children’s education. It is going to take the strength of your convictions and your character to stick with this noble but frustrating calling.

2. Focus. This is a tough characteristic to maintain over the long haul. There are so many other important activities and responsibilities pulling at you that your volunteer time sometimes takes a back seat to other pressing matters. It is unrealistic to expect one person to maintain a laser-like focus on school fundraising during the entire school calendar, so I think the better strategy would be to get several people to share in a part of that necessary focus. Make sure you have a good team to work with on the task of raising money. Going it alone is a sure-fire plan to get burned out.

3. Brand. I know this sounds very “marketing-speak” but it does have a significant importance in your school fundraising campaigns. Just like you are attracted to certain marketing campaigns out in the world, you should think about the ways you present your fundraising materials for public consumption. How is your audience going to react to your fliers? Your website or Facebook page? How will they respond to your ideas for fundraising events? Do you keep them interested with new uses of technology? If you are sending out black and white, clip-art type of announcements, no one is even going to read them. There goes your participation and there goes your revenue.

4. Relationships. If you are going to involve people in your community in your fundraising efforts, you will need to develop and foster those relationships, even outside of the fundraising events themselves. You will need to be their customer all year long. If you want their support, you will have to support them. Also, if you want to be able to ask parents for money at various times of year, you will need to give them some things without asking for money. These could be social events or free activities for kids during the school day. Remember the golden rule, treat others the way you would like to be treated, especially when you’re asking them for money!

5. The Little Things. While you have an overarching goal of how much money your group needs to raise in a year, you need to make sure that you pay attention to the details of running a smooth organization. The cumulative effect of small details can really form a positive or a negative impression in the minds of your fundraising audience. Do you mess up orders with the cookie dough sale? Is your walk-a-thon totally disorganized? Do you have the wrong dates printed on fliers? Did you forget to thank your school carnival volunteers? All these things, by themselves, seem relatively minor. But if you have a consistent pattern of missing the details, people will start to notice. Then they will form a poor opinion about your abilities as a fundraiser, which will make your job much more difficult.

Fundraising is very much like a sales job. You need to convince your audience that they should part with their money and send it to your school. That’s a tough task, but it one that you signed up for. So, let’s try to make this as simple and as straight forward as possible.

Here’s one piece of advice that can help win over skeptical parents: Be absolutely sure that every single fundraiser you run is CLEARLY linked to the goal you have in mind. So many times, parents are confronted with a fundraising letter or a packet of information about the product they are being asked to sell, but very little information as to what the heck the money they raise will be used for.

To me, this is a cardinal sin of fundraising. Am I just supposed to “trust” that whatever fundraiser shows up in my kid’s backpack is legit? Well thought out? Necessary? A good deal for the school? I know this may come as a shock to those working in the schools, but not every thing is worthy of a fundraiser. With so many families having to be conscious of how much they spend, there should be a much higher bar when it comes to deciding what merits a fundraiser.

Sadly, I don’t know if I’ve ever gotten a really excellent explanation as to what the money is going to be used for in any individual fundraiser, and I’ve got four kids who have been in school for a while, too.

There have been basic explanations, of course, but nothing that really knocked my socks off and convinced me that no matter what my current financial situation is, I really have to make a sacrifice and donate to the school.

That means the people who have been in charge of fundraising at my kids’ schools have not been very effective sales people.

Think about it. If you were in the market for a new or used car, you’d do a lot of research on the vehicle before plunking down your hard-earned cash, right?

I even did a lot of reading up on televisions before I bought a new set recently. I had to figure out the differences between plasma and LCD. I wasn’t going to spend a few hundred dollars without knowing what I was doing. I spent a lot of time with the sales staff at our local electronics store, before I finally made a purchase. The salesman had to work for my sale. He had to be knowledgeable about everything I could have thought to ask. He knew that the quality of his answers was directly linked to my money.

This is the same mindset anyone raising money in a school setting has to take.

And, as I wrote above, the first way you can do this, is being crystal clear with your audience, what it is you are asking them to buy. Go ahead, knock their socks off!

Photo by: altemark

You’ll find resources to help you navigate every aspect of school life- from planning fundraisers to how to run PTO meetings, to being able to vent about your frustrations in a friendly forum. PTO Today is a site that everyone involved in school fundraising should be checking out on a regular basis.

The president of PTO Today is Tim Sullivan. Tim has spent his entire career in the education world. He has worked as a teacher and administrator at a NYC high school, then as a senior manager for a New England-based fundraising concern; and now as the founder and leader of PTO Today. He has spoken at hundreds of parent group meetings and to tens of thousands of parent group leaders all across the country. He also maintains a role as a senior writer for PTO Today magazine and is a leading voice on best practices in connecting with parent group leaders.

I spoke to Tim once about the topic of fundraising fatigue. Since he deals with hundreds of schools, he has a verey good perspective on how to ask parents for money without over-burdening him. Here are a few of the things Tim had to say on this topic:

“If you’re feeling the negative effects of fundraising fatigue—perhaps your latest sale didn’t go as well as last year’s or you’re having trouble finding volunteers to help out with the counting—then the problem is likely with your group’s fundraising habits. Nine times out of 10, fundraising struggles are self-inflicted.”

To combat the symptoms of fundraising fatigue, Tim suggests two strategies.

“First, we have to run fewer fundraisers, but run those few more effectively. (Dump a couple—you’ll live!) Two weeks of really hard work and focused fundraising attention is often way better than 12 weeks where some combination of smaller fundraisers are taking place.

“Second, we need to keep in mind the very reason we are engaged in fundraising efforts at all. “The reality is that fundraising provides essential funds for the extras that turn schools from piles of bricks with teachers inside into magical places of discovery and learning and community. Playgrounds. Field trips. A child’s first exposure to the theater or music. The family event that cements friendships that last a lifetime. These are the essentials of fundraising.”

Here is a short video Tim recently posted on PTO Today that covers this topic above, as well as how to grow parent involvement at your school. Thanks to Tim and his staff for doing so much great work that helps us raise money at our schools!

Quick, can you name the principal at an elementary school your kids don’t attend? Ok, how about the name of their PTO or PTA chair?

Perhaps you are an amazing social creature and could identify these people, but I’m guessing the chances of that are pretty slim. Even in small towns, we tend to focus only on what is right in front of us. This generally makes sense, as we only have so much time to give, we have to prioritize and take care of the items most immediately important. An elementary school just six blocks away might as well be as far away as the moon.

However, as you prepare for this upcoming school year, I want to suggest that you change your way of thinking about this situation.

Here are eight questions I think you should ask about the other schools in your district. The answers you find could very well add new life and bring greater success to your own efforts in your kids’ school.

1. Who are the people involved on the other schools’ fundraising teams?
2. How long have these fundraising leaders been involved with raising money for their school?
3. Do the other schools have many parents involved or do they struggle to find volunteers for their fundraising events? If they are successful, what are they doing that you might not be to attract busy families?
4. What is each school’s biggest (most successful) fundraising event or sale?
5. If another school has the same kind of fundraising event or sale as your school does, are they more or less successful? Why or why not?
6. Do the other schools stick with one or two annual events for years or are they always looking to implement new approaches and novel ideas?
7. How diverse is their fundraising schedule? (How well do they mix up large events with small events, sales vs. events, passive vs. active strategies, etc?)
8. What is the key piece of advice another school could share with you that explains their success in fundraising?

You would think that all principals would be super enthusiastic about raising as much money as possible to fund all of the things they want for their school.

However, this is not the case at all. I have learned this from experience.

First, there are principals who feel guilty asking parents that he knows are struggling financially to give money to the school. As a result, they keep fundraising to an absolute minimum, never try anything new, only go with what they know works, downplays the importance of the event or the sale, and never thinks big. While I don’t’ agree with this mindset, I can at least understand their feelings of compassion for those who might not be able to donate.

And, then there are the principals who are so academic, so up in their ivory tower, that they view fundraising as “beneath” them, so they keep anything to do with raising money at a great distance from themselves. It’s something to be handled by volunteers, because he, the principal, has much more important things to think about. Since I was a principal of a school myself, I do know that there are many important things to think about, but fundraising has to be included on that list. And, it is my view that the principal should be the schools number one cheerleader for fundraising, simply because he or she sets the tone that everyone else follows.

A third kind of principal is the one who figured it all out years ago, created a system that seems to work for him or her and refuses to change it or put in any more thought to it. This kind of principal is not hostile toward fundraising, it’s just that he or she believes fundraising is a necessary evil, not that difficult to figure out, and they simply came up with a solution. End of story. I’ve seen this at a middle school that’s run the same candy bar sale for 25 years in the fall and the same fruit sale in the spring. Nothing has changed in a quarter century. They always hit their goal, but they never push any higher. This just shows me a stunning lack of creativity on the part of the principal. And I have to believe that it extends into everything else he or she does at the school.

So, if you are volunteering with a parent-teacher type organization, and it is your job to run a fundraiser, you should very quickly find out what kind of principal you are dealing with. Hopefully, he or she will be very helpful, understanding, and supportive of your efforts.

In the next post, I will offer some suggestions as to how you can possibly help your principal see things a little differently.

Photo by: falcon1961

No matter where you fit in the fundraising team at your school, you should be very concerned with the possibility of your hard-earned savings being stolen by someone close to your organization.

I know this is very hard to wrap your head around, but incidents of embezzling PTO funds happen quite regularly. In fact, I woke up this morning to see this headline in my Google Alerts:

Woman accused of stealing from PTO booked: About $8K allegedly taken

Whenever these kinds of articles pop up, I always wonder how long the embezzling had been going on before it was discovered. How long did the other people in the school not know what was happening? How many times was an illegal check written and cashed? How many times was the petty cash drawer robbed before somebody figured out something was amiss?

For a figure of almost $8,000 to have been stolen, the embezzlement must have been going on for months, if not a couple of years.

That means, nobody was paying attention to the school finances for a very long time. It also means that the guilty party in this mess had unchecked access to the organization’s finances. Obviously, this was not smart.

So, the first thing I think you should do at your school is to find out who is in charge of the money. Is it just one person? If that’s the case, things have got to change immediately, for everybody’s sake. Checks should always have to be signed by more than one person. There should be monthly financial reports that are prepared by more than one person and then checked by another person altogether.

I also think that, even though parent-teacher organizations are separate from the school office, they should use the school’s money handling policies and guidelines.

For every instance that money is being transferred from one party to another in a school environment, you must have the most transparent process possible. If you don’t know what to do, go get advice from your bank or your accounting firm. Let the professionals set you on a course of financial best practices and security, so your school doesn’t end up like so many that have fallen victim.

That behavior is consistency.

It seems that many fundraising professionals or volunteers start off with great intentions in September. They have all sorts of documents ready to send home to parents, they’ve got their applications all in for the cash-back programs at the local supermarkets, they’ve made up attractive bulletin boards, they’ve developed some ideas to increase volunteerism, you name it- they’re ready.

But then, the school year starts, people get busy, a key volunteer drops out of sight, whatever. All those good intentions slip away and suddenly, the PTO newsletter is three months behind. When I see that happening, I can be pretty sure the school is not making the most it could be in their fundraising efforts.

So, as you are in the mode of planning your school fundraising calendar this year, I urge you to make consistency, sticking to your plan, your number one goal. It will support everything else that you do.

The best way to ensure your “stick-to-itiveness” is to have a strong support network, even if it’s just two or three people who will keep bringing up “old business”. It might help to rename “old business” to something more positive like “consistency issues”, but the point remains the same. You and your group need to keep up with all the projects you’ve started that are supposed to be on-going throughout the year, like newsletter publishing, bulletin board creating, Facebook updating, soup label collecting, returnable bottle accepting, and all the other things that aren’t time or date-specific.

The downside to being inconsistent in your projects is that parents won’t take you seriously in the long run. They know if you get all excited about something new, it will eventually lose its novelty and be tossed aside for the next amazing new thing.

I also think that by being consistent for the entire year, you’ll make more money. If you maintain a monthly push for soup labels and box tops, from September to June, you’ll make way more than if you start strong in September and peter out by Christmas.

I know this seems like very basic and obvious point, and it is, but really, it happens so much in schools, that I think it’s important to mention it here and do everything you can to guard against it.

Photo by: TooFarNorth’s photostream

As you are planning your school carnival, you must start to think of them in this capacity, as well.

The simple truth is, if the teachers want something to happen, it happens. If they don’t see the importance of an issue, it “mysteriously” fades away.

This is why you do not want to alienate the staff in any way. You are counting on these people to make sure fliers get passed out on time, important announcements are stressed to the students, auction projects are well-thought out, well-crafted, and done on time, and that they actually show up to help on the day of the carnival with big smiles on their faces.

With the many responsibilities a teacher has, you’ve really got to make a strong effort to gain their full attention. Here are some suggestions:

1. Butter them up- a cup of gourmet coffee, a small plant, a modest gift card, or just a simple note of appreciation goes a long way toward winning a person over. You should have volunteers whose sole job it is to sprinkle the teachers with affection.

2. Be clear with your expectations- put everything that you want the teachers to do in writing. It’s way too easy for them to make a verbal promise and then get busy and forget. Teachers need clarity and specificity from us. If you want them to remind students to make sure their money is in for the pre-sale wristbands next Friday, put it in a memo and hand it to each teacher individually. Don’t ever assume that a teacher knows what we actually want to happen and when.

3. Give them plenty of lead time- Don’t hand them that memo on Thursday, expecting them to do something the very next day. Give them at least a week to make something happen. Of course, emergencies do arise when you’ll need immediate help, but don’t go to that well very often.

4. Follow up regularly- So many things get piled on top of teachers that it is very wise to keep checking in on them. Be careful not to become a stalker, but keep sending them a warm, positive message that you want to help. If you become “top of mind” -in a good way- they will come to appreciate you.

5. Don’t take teachers for granted!- If you ever start to think that teachers are simply going to help you out, just because they love the school, you will be sadly mistaken and sorely disappointed. Remember that a teacher’s first priority is to teach. Raising money, even when it benefits their classroom, doesn’t rank as high. You’re going to have to work at winning the teachers to your cause.

In a similar fashion, you will also need to communicate effectively with the principal. Having worked in this office myself, I can speak with experience that the most important thing for me was to know that things were getting accomplished and nobody was complaining.

Make sure the principal knows what you are up to as you are scurrying about the hallways, but you don’t need to bog him or her down with details. Just send a message that you are taking care of business, and in most cases, you’ll be left alone to do your work.

Be careful, however, not to abuse the trust of a principal. This man or woman is the key to your freedom of movement. If you are seen to be a loose canon or a general disruption, you will find your ability to move freely sharply curtailed.

Photo by: mikebaird