I’m not much of a businessman, but that seems to make sense, right? After all, you already have your previous customers’ (or clients’) names, email addresses, physical addresses, phone numbers, and even information about what they bought from you, which indicates preferences and tastes.

You just don’t have that kind of information on people you haven’t dealt with yet. So, you have to work hard and spend lots of money to get new people to become part of your non-profit community.

Now, that’s not to say that you shouldn’t always be looking to grow your community, but what I am driving at is there are many reasons to put a significant effort into getting more out of the people already part of the group, alumni, if you will.
Here are three ways alumni can help your organization in very important ways. The final four examples will come in the second part of this article to be published soon.

1. Fundraising. It is much easier to make a compelling fundraising case to people who already have been touched in a positive way by your non-profit. In fact, it is possible that alumni would be extra-open to receive fundraising solicitation letters by mail, since you really don’t have to convince them to give. Letter drives are much cheaper to run for the non-profit, so the overhead costs normally associated with product sales or lage events are eliminated. You just have paper, printer ink, envelopes, address labels, and postage. Not bad.

2. Public Relations. If you keep in good touch with your alumni donors and/or clients, it’s not too much of a stretch to ask them to help you spread the good word about your organization in your city or town. This doesn’t have to be very formal, but they could use a coffee mug with your organization’s logo on it at work, they could just post on their Facebook page an event of yours that they are planning on attending, they could upload photos of their volunteer experience with your group to Flickr, they could tell their friend who works at the local newspaper what great work you’re doing on behalf of…. The ist goes on. Just ask your alumni to keep thinking of you and how more people could be turned on to the group. The rest will come on its own.

3. Board Members. Non-profits are always on the look-out for new board members. The alumni ranks is a great place to start the search. And this doesn’t have to be a rushed process. Usually, alumni that are invested in the organization aren’t going anywhere. This gives the director of the group, as well as the existing board members, time to get to know the person in question and vet their background to make sure he or she is a good fit. Love of the organization is so important when picking new board members. An actively involved alumnus or alumna comes with that built in.

4. In-Kind Donations. The fourth way that alumni can be used more effectively by non-profits is to solicit goods and services at greatly reduced prices, possibly even donated completely. If you have a gentleman who was once part of your organization, and he went on to become an architect and you need blueprints for a new building, he might be able to work with you on a great price. If there was a lady who used to be a client or customer of your organization, and she is now an attorney, you might get some pro bono work out of her. The same is true for craftsmen, like electricians, plumbers, and landscapers.
I strongly suggest that you start finding out what your alumni members do for a living, and then start becoming friends with them, if you aren’t already. In a time when new income is hard to generate, reduced expenses are a great method for helping your bottom line.

5. Word of Mouth. The fifth way alumni members can be helpful to an organization is to help recruit new customers for you. Why spend lots of money on marketing, when we all know that word of mouth advertising works best. A strong recommendation from a friend is much more effective than a print ad or radio spot. Therefore, you should look at your alumni as walking billboards. Perhaps you can create some talking points for your alumni, so they are current on what your group offers, but really count on their passion and enthusiasm for your cause to convince others to try you out.

6. Volunteer. A sixth way that alumni can lend a hand to your organization is to volunteer. This may seem like a no-brainer, but with everybody having a busy schedule, volunteerism is often forgotten. If you can create a volunteer experience that is well-planned, rewarding, and appreciated, you’ll have your alumni clamoring to sign up.
I have often found it is also a little easier asking alumni to volunteer for things because at one point in their lives, they benefited from volunteer help. So, I’m simply asking them to pay it back a little.

7. Historical Projects. The seventh suggestion I have for non-profits to use their alumni more effectively is to find a few interested people to undertake historical projects. This might include sorting through and labeling old photos, slides, and movies. Or, it could be writing histories of specific events or periods in your group’s past. It could also mean trying to collect pictures of mementos from previous eras. I think you could also get some volunteers to create attractive historical displays that could be hung in your group’s facility.

People love remembering and honoring the past, especially if they were part of it. You should capitalize on this human inclination and get as many alumni involved in preserving your organization’s history as you can. A non-profit that knows and can share its past has a much better chance to have a long and prosperous future.

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

I have written about VolunteerSpot before. Here is a quick description of their mission:

VolunteerSpot launched in Spring, 2009 with the mission of enabling ANYONE to quickly mobilize and coordinate volunteers in their community, congregation and social network. VolunteerSpot’s simple sign up application makes it easy for community members to participate and say YES to volunteering. No waiting for approvals and passwords, no software to install, just easy, free scheduling and sign up tools for everyday heroes making a difference.

If you haven’t been to their site and checked out their amazing free products, you should do so right away. They can make a huge difference in the way you work with your volunteer workers.

On their blog today, they posted specific examples of the kind of resources they can provide for you. I have included a couple of pictures (below) for you to see what they’re talking about. To see more, just click on over to their site.

Here is an excerpt from their blog post:

Sign Up Sheets for School, Sports and Other Fall Events

Fall is full of classroom parties, sports events, fall holidays and service projects. It’s always inspiring to see the creative ways VolunteerSpot’s free online signup sheets are put to use!

We wanted to highlight some simple sign up sheets that make it easy to ask for help during the busy fall season. Whether you’re organizing — classroom Halloween Party, School Carnival, Neighborhood Cleanup, Lacrosse Tournament, pumpkin patch fundraiser — asking for help lowers your stress level and gives others an opportunity to feel (really) good as they can easily contribute to your good work.

Whatever you’re organizing, we hope VolunteerSpot will save you time, get more people involved and make your life a little easier!

Fall Signup Sheet Examples

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

Since I have four school age children myself, I know who tough this can be. We juggle several balls at once, just like everybody else. So, even though it’s sad to admit, if something isn’t mandatory, there is a lot less pressure for me to show up at something. It’s just the way it is.

There are a couple of elementary schools in San Diego, California, that have recognized this situation, and they have taken a very bold step against it.

According to a report in The La Jolla Light,

The La Jolla Elementary School PTO and the Bird Rock Foundation have announced the dates for their Back to School sign-up days for the many programs and required forms for the forthcoming school year.

This marks the first year that Bird Rock Elementary School will host a sign up event.

The sign-up days are mandatory for all new and returning families, and will include information and/or registration for the following activities and events:

• Completing mandatory district and school requirements
• Purchasing products like yearbooks and logo wear
• Signing up for volunteer opportunities and after school programs
• Donating to the Annual Giving Campaign.
• Joining the PTO/Parent Foundation

“We want to provide parents with a convenient, one-stop approach to organize their child’s coming school year,” said Julie MacDonald, La Jolla Elementary PTO President. “By offering forms and information for everything needed to begin and progress through the school year, we free both parents and school staff to focus solely on the start of classes when September 6th arrives.”

Wow! What a novel idea! Make the parents attend by making the sign up event mandatory.

Does your school do this? If so, how has it gone over? Does every family show up? Do the families who do sign up actually follow through on what they commit to? Is there visible resentment from some parents at being forced to attend a school function?

I ask these questions, because this approach is new to me.  I’m fascinated to learn how common this very smart approach is.

In the near future, I will attempt to contact these two elementary schools and see how things have gone for them and what advice they have for other schools considering such a move.

Photo by: Libelul

One such excellent resource is a website called VolunteerSpot.com. The process of recruiting and managing volunteers can be a very stressful and confusing job. Just communicating to your families the individual tasks that need to be accomplished is difficult enough. If you need to assign volunteers to shifts, that gets even more complicated to keep track of.

But VolunteerSpot.com makes all these steps much easier. Here are a couple of video descriptions of what VolunteerSpot is and what it can do.

I have known and worked with Karen Bantuveris, the president and founder of VolunteerSpot, a few times over the past couple of years, and what she has built is absolutely amazing. In just a few short years, VolunteerSpot has managed more than 1.5 million volunteer hours performed by people all over the country, in all kinds of non-profit organizations.

On their site, you can download free e-books about popular non-profit topics, you can download a demo of the VolunteerSpot software, read their regularly updated blog, and learn how to sync your VolunteerSpot.com account from your computer to your smart phone, so you can have everything you need, right in your pocket!

Take a couple of minutes to visit their site and see how this awesome volunteer management program can revolutionize the way you communicate with your school families!

This is, as I’m sure you are aware, a challenging thing to accomplish. People are busy, they get swept up with their own schedules, and volunteering in a classroom or cutting out box tops quickly become the last things they think about.

One of your jobs, as a fundraising volunteer, is to help the parents remember that they need to stay involved. There are many ways to do this, but today I want to focus on the very first step you should take in this ongoing task.

I believe that it very difficult to get people to think about volunteering until they actually know what they could specifically do. Since I’m a parent of four young children myself, I know that I get hit with dozens of fliers each year that advertise this volunteer opportunity or that. Sometimes, I’ll get three or four in quick succession, other times, I won’t see such a flier for months. I never know when I’ll be needed or what for. It’s always a surprise. And usually not a good one.

Therefore, I think it might be helpful, right off the bat, to create a master flier/letter that lists all the things parents can volunteer for throughout the year. You can include large items, like a school carnival or walk-a-thon that would be time specific, and non-specific fundraising activities like turning in grocery receipts for cash. The point is to lay out the whole plan for parents in one shot.

If you can be specific with dates and estimated time requirements, that would be very helpful too.

While a letter and checklist like this won’t guarantee a flood of volunteers, it is a very good first step in the ongoing battle to recruit people to lend a hand.

Photo by: Pnash

I’m talking about the volunteer interest and skills form.

If your school hasn’t sent such a form out in the past, I strongly recommend that you absolutely do so this year.

Now, I have four kids in school, so I see a lot of paperwork coming home. It’s very easy to let one form slip through the cracks and not send it back in. However, I believe that this questionnaire is so important, the teachers need to place some sort of requirement on it. For instance, they could require that this form be signed and returned by parents by a certain date.

The main purpose of this form is to find out the following information:

• The names of the student’s parents

• All their contact information, including email and other online addresses

• What the parent’s occupations are

• What their hobbies/interests are

• If they have any special skills, like woodworking or artistic talent

• If they’ve volunteered in the past, and if so, what did they do

• If they are active online with social media sites like Twitter or Facebook

• If they are active texters and if they mind receiving texts from the school

I would also create a list of all the possible volunteer jobs that will come up during the year. Whatever fundraisers or other school activities you run, break them down into the volunteer positions they require. Ask the parents to check all the opportunities that would interest them.

You need to shoot for 100% completion/return rate. Unless there is a very special circumstance with a student’s family situation, you should follow up with any students who do not turn in their forms.

Then the next vital step in this process is to RECORD all this vital information into a database that you will actually reference and use. If you can’t quickly access this information, it is worthless. But, if you need to quickly mobilize a work force or find out who can build a set for the school play, you’ll have all that info at your fingertips.

So, with about a month to go before many schools start, take a hard look at how you’re going to collect all the vital information you’ll need to be successful in your fundraising efforts all year long.

Photo by: SMJJP

When planning your school carnival, you may find yourself in a situation where you’re having trouble coming up with enough volunteers, due to the high number needed. At this point, you may consider recruiting older children, perhaps middle school or high school age to fill the gaps.

I think this is a fine solution to your problem, as long as you are able to give the student-helpers strong direction and supervision. While this may be a stereotype against young people, many of them do not have extensive experience in customer service or even a work history whatsoever.

Be very clear in your instructions and expectations.

As a precaution, you should be very clear with them that while they are on duty, their first priority is the entertainment of the children. Therefore, no cell phones or other electronic devices may be used while they are “working”.

Also, instruction should be given on your expectations for how to talk to customers. Each worker should greet the children and their parents with a friendly hello and continue to be polite and welcoming throughout the families’ entire experience.

Ask the student helpers to put themselves in the place of the parents.

Explain to the student-helpers that if a parent feels his or her child is not being made to feel welcome, the parent may start to develop negative feelings about the entire event. As a result, that parent may spend less money at the carnival and could even leave early, before other money-spending opportunities, such as the basket auction, have even begun.
I would also insist on having a dress code for all the volunteers. If you apply the restrictions to everyone, the teens won’t feel singled out.

To be fair, I have worked with many young people who have had vastly superior customer service skills than most adults. So, please don’t get me wrong. Teenagers could be a terrific asset to your carnival. I’m only advising you not to assume too much and be prepared to teach some things that you might actually take for granted.

Your Turn

Do you have any ideas on the subject of letting teen-agers work for your school carnival?  What’s your experience been like?  Please share with us in our comment section!  Thanks!

Photo by: St Peter’s Community News

PTO groups across America struggle with how to spread the workload over many hands.

One of the ways some groups try to recruit volunteers is to offer prizes of some kind. For instance, a PTO might announce that they will be holding a drawing at the next meeting for a $10 gift card to Applebee’s.

Or another group might give actual tickets out to those who attend meetings during the year. At the end of the year, you put all your tickets into a bucket and a winner is selected for a bigger prize than just dinner. The more meetings you attend, the more tickets you have in the bucket and the greater your chances of winning.

Click here to enroll in Jim Berigan’s FREE year-long school fundraising e-Course!

I’ve even read about a parent-teacher group (from the PTO Today message boards) that got permission from the principal to hand out “homework passes” that would excuse a student from a regular homework assignment. The only way to get these passes were for parents to attend the meetings.

But, is this system actually a good idea?

Some might say that it’s pretty sad when you have to bribe parents to help their own children. Other might look at a $10 gift card as not worth their time and effort.

However, we are all aware that in many families, both parents work, and in some families, both parents work multiple jobs. This is a huge reason why participation in parent teacher groups has fallen. It’s hard to get upset at parents when we know this is the cause, not just laziness.

Do you think it’s a good idea to offer these kinds of incentives at your school? How would parents respond? Please share your thoughts with us in our comment section. We’d love to read them!

Photo by: betsyweber