It is of the utmost importance that you keep your PTO's member base informed about things that are happening at your school and ways that they can get involved. While this can be done through traditional newsletters and flyers, the best way to simplify your life and create a professional communication network is through social media, apps and other digital tools.
Donor outreach tools
Here are some platforms that will allow you to communicate better with your membership base:
Signup (formerly VolunteerSpot) is a scheduling and volunteer tool that makes it easy for people to join in on your events. It's a go-to free resource for recruiting parents and teachers to pitch in at your events. All you have to do is create an event on their platform, send one email out and Signup does the rest. They send automatic reminders to volunteers, create an easy-to-use online calendar, and give you a clean interface that reduces your workload.
Like it or love it, Facebook still rules social media, and it should absolutely be a staple for your PTO. Your PTO is an outward facing platform that is in charge of communicating and setting goals across a large network. You need to be able to reach out to parents, students, teachers and faculty, and the best way to do that is through Facebook. Nearly everyone has a Facebook account and use it to share and attain information. Its broad base and ability to be quickly shared to community members not in your immediate email list makes it a perfect way to spread news and events held by your PTO.
You may know mailchimp from your favorite podcasts like Serial. It's a free email platform that allows you to create professional quality monthly newsletters, personalized emails and gives you reports on the effectiveness of your email campaigns. It even allows you to create mailing groups so you can easily reach out to the right people with the emails meant for them. Mailchimp automates a process that is otherwise grueling to do alone and is a must have for a PTO that is frequently reaching out to parents, teachers and community.
Slack is a team workspace organizer. It sets your team into multiple channels so that you can organize thoughts and ideas with your committees to get your events and plans off the ground faster. Slack is a really cool tool for organizing your communication channels rather than having to search through text or email chains to find the right group. It also just looks really nice. Another really appealing point is that Slack offers an 85% discounted price for non-profits.
As we discussed in our e-mail series, fundraising is a fundamental part of a PTO, and Handbid is the best way to bring your silent charity auction to the next level. Allowing your guests to bid for donated items through their smartphone, eases your workload and guarantees a higher ceiling on the amount of money each item will be auctioned off for, making more money for you PTO.
Handbid allows your guests to bid from anywhere, just as long as they are connected to your event, and this is truly what makes Handbid remarkable. Through Handbid, you have the ability to send texts and push notifications to your registered donors anytime. That means any fundraising event that you have, your donors have immediate access in participating.
It's often said that it's easy to get a customer but hard to keep one. Handbid specializes in keeping your donors donating to your PTO, and that's why we guarantee that our mobile bidding platform will have you pulling in more donations than your school has ever seen.
Learn how Handbid’s charity auction platform can work for your nonprofit!
What’s a Rich Text element?
The rich text element allows you to create and format headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, images, and video all in one place instead of having to add and format them individually. Just double-click and easily create content.
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Static and dynamic content editing
A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
How to customize formatting for each rich text
Headings, paragraphs, blockquotes, figures, images, and figure captions can all be styled after a class is added to the rich text element using the "When inside of" nested selector system.
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