the groupery blog

RELEVANCE AND CONNECTION

Moving from Audience to Engaged Community

Every presenter knows the value of popping a few quick questions prior to deliverying the message to see which “direction” will best engage their particular audience.   This ability to tailor the content and ensure relevance is lost in traditional communications such as newsletters and email blasts which are essentially “one-way broadcasts” into the atmosphere.  Not only is the communicator left wondering what part of the communication was most compelling (and to whom), but also, she/he wonders if any of it mattered to anyone.

 

Bonafide community engagement is a struggle!

the groupery is helping leaders transform passive, silent audiences into engaged, sustainable communities that add real value to the organization.  Through the groupery’s online tools, platform and “next practices” (developed in conjunction with hundred of volunteer leaders) volunteer leaders like Anne Siple of Vestavia Hills Elementary Liberty Park (VHELP) School and Kimberly Cook of Liberty Park Middle School (LPMS) have transformed their parent communities.  By providing a range of options through which parents in the community can connect and contribute to the goals and by making it easy and appealing for all parents to “jump in,” these two leaders have created high-value, sustainable communities.

 

At VHELP, 99% of the school’s parents participate in their online community via the groupery.  This community receives communications from the principal, parent leaders and the other parents via group emails and online newsletters.  Importantly, parents can control their involvement (what they want to “hear” about), ensuring that the communications they receive are relevant.   Group emails allow for dialogue and easy-participation so everyone “has a voice.”

 

According to Anne, “Quite simply, online communication and dialogue via the groupery is making people really happy.”  “People who don’t feel invited, don’t step up.  Everyone needs to feel like they’re needed, they’re invited and their participation and support will make a difference.”  VHELP’s online community directly and consistently supports the needs of the school.

 

At LPMS, 94% of the parent community has jumped into the online community.  According to parent leader Kimberly Cook, “As the parent community at LPMS began to receive consistent, reliable, relevant communication from the school, they became hooked.”  With Kimberly’s leadership and the groupery, parents know what’s going on, who to direct questions to and where resources are most needed. Kimberly no longer worries about adequate resources.  Whether it’s donations, volunteer time commitments or an unexpected volunteer need, the parent community is informed, engaged and willing to step up and contribute.   “the groupery has been phenomenal,” Kimberly says.  From volunteer recruitment to event planning to email lists designed to deliver global messages to the whole community or specific messages to the parents in a particular classroom,  the groupery has significantly increased parent participation by allowing visibility and reliable two-way communication throughout the community.  Not only has Kimberly noticed a significant increase in the diversity of volunteers – “not the same 10% who always show up” but also the increased percentage of parents who are active, engaged members.

 

Via the groupery, these volunteer leaders have created engaged, sustainable communities that provide valuable resources and directly contribute to the overall mission.

Celebrate Make A Difference Day

 

To celebrate Make A Difference Day on October 24, the groupery will award 6 volunteer groups 4 hours (each) of Leader's Companion service for FREE.    Leader's Companion is one-on-one, hands-on support from an expert at the groupery specifically geared to support your efforts and help your group reach its goals.  Whether your group needs help recruiting volunteers for a particular event, getting members organized with an online directory, setting up effective group email lists, other?  the groupery's in-house experts are here to help!

How to enter to WIN your FREE support:
Simply go to http://bit.ly/PYHgd and let us know how your group would benefit by using the groupery.

Want to learn more?
Please join us on October 9 at 9:00 a.m. pst for a FREE webinar:
Organize your group for Annual Make a Difference Day
In this FREE webinar, you will see first hand what makes the groupery the choice for volunteer groups.  And how your group can make the most of Make a Difference Day.
Register today and please feel free to forward this link to other volunteers you know who might like to join us!  To register click here:  http://bit.ly/13qmM0

Feel free to visit our website @ www.thegroupery.com  to learn how hundreds of leaders from school groups, non-profits, clubs, scouting troops, and religious organizations are making the most of their volunteers' contributions with the groupery. 

Emergencies, The Groupery, and Other Social Media

In a previous post, I talked a little bit about social media in the context of an emergency, specifically uses of social media as an emergency unfolds.

The example was, of course, the horrifying terrorist attacks of last week.  In the face of the trauma and despair this may seem a little bit insensitive, but I do want to cover how social media can be used in the context of every-day school communications.

A good overview of how municipalities can integrate social media in their strategies is at Jeremiah Owyang's blog

And Lorelle on Wordpress's blog discusses how to use social media to communicate during a natural disaster.

The idea to keep in mind is that if you were in a crowded open party and you either needed to shout to the crowd or pass information to a specific person but you couldn't find them, use Twitter.

If you want to permanently post information to a group, and in particular if you hope people outside your group will see and refer to your news, use a blog -- there can be comments or not, as you prefer.

If you want to have people from different groups meet each other, use a large, open social network like Facebook or MySpace.

And if you want to communicate with your group in a way that is either private, or allows for further group action, you can use the groupery.

Mumbai, Schools, and Disaster Communication

Amidst the unfolding horror of the attack in Mumbai today, I want to take a moment to point out how Twitter is being used to keep people informed during an emergency.

Twitter is an asynchronous chat. "Asynchronous" means that, like email lists, people talk to each other but not at the same time, and "chat" in this case means that a group can communicate by text message from any cell phone, or by using a web interface.  Messages are limited to 140 characters -- not very long at all.

So imagine people are now able to send text messages to the world at large during an emergency. What might they say or do?

Today, in the case of the attack in Mumbai, I found someone through a friend, who was providing extensive coverage by rebroadcasting -- called "retweeting" or "RT" for short -- news and notable information as she unearthed it.

So the following are three consecutive "tweets" (what one calls a text message on twitter) from @asteris, a user at Twitter (http://twitter.com/asteris).

RT @mumbaiattack: #mumbai Terrorist organization now has access to all police and rescue attempt information via hijacked police vehicle
http://tinyurl.com/5cm9sf MumbaiHelp blog focuses on attacks
http://www.nowpublic.com/ta... NowPublic is scanning Twitter for multiple term references to the Mumbai attacks

There are several things going on in the first "tweet."

First, someone has set up an account called mumbaiattack. If I were a user, I would click on the link mumbaiattack, and choose to "follow" that person, and if I allow their tweets to go to my cell phone, I would be able to get updates there. Note that the @ symbol is used to denote a user.  So we say @asteris is referring to what @mumbaiattack had originally said.  

The "hash tag" #mumbai is used by anyone who is commenting on the subject, whether or not they will say the word mumbai in their post. For example you could tweet:  "The Taj Mahal is in flames, there are hostages inside #mumbai" and anyone who wants to search on the topic in the broadest sense can search on the term #mumbai.

So if you were going to make sense of that first tweet from Asteris, it would read like this: "I am retweeting the user mumbaiattack, who said 'Terrorist organization now has access to all police and rescue attempt information via hijacked police vehicle.' This is related to the search term #mumbai."

The second tweet is a blog set up specifically to help this instance.  You can see that it has limitations - how do you find what you might be looking for in the comments?  It has the advantage that all the messages are visibly in one place. It has the disadvantage that it's tough to sort through the messages.

The third tweet is announcing a website that is measuring the volume of news. It's a very interesting site.

Another alternative for those who want to look for things themselves is to go to http://search.twitter.com and enter the term "#mumbai" (or "mumbai") into the search box.

In my next post, I'll write up how to use this technique in a school, pta and community context.

Volunteer groups deserve great productivity and fundraising tools too!

A couple years ago, as parents with kids starting school, we suddenly came face-to-face with the classic problem faced by every parent of school-aged children: “Junior, what did you do with the field trip sign-up form your teacher gave you to bring home today?” 

Of course, that was the tip of the iceberg, and not only from our naïve parent perspective.   We soon realized that t he pain involved in coordinating the most basic volunteer-driven group activity is truly astounding: long email chains to recruit volunteers and agree on a meeting date, dealing with numerous paper forms – many of which need to be repeated year after year, checks and cash payments leading to painstaking spreadsheet and accounting work, having people forget their volunteer obligations, and so on.

Most volunteer groups -- PTA’s, PTO’s, troops, clubs, teams, and even sophisticated philanthropic organizations -- suffer from many of these same productivity, efficiency, and fundraising challenges, and have been left behind to deal with them using tools from the 1980’s (emails, spreadsheets, and phone calls). And yet, year-after-year, because of their dedication to the cause, volunteers dutifully persist, taking their turn at the coordinator wheel. 

So, we started the groupery, met with a lot of people with years of experience at those coordinator steering wheels (some of whom then joined us!), and designed our online solution around the elements that matter most to family-oriented volunteer-driven groups, such as: how to keep in touch with each other, remind each other about what’s going on, organize volunteer schedules, place orders and make payments and even process payments efficiently if you happen to be the Treasurer. A lot of software is designed based on the way computers worked, but we used the languages and concepts that communities use:  family guardians can act for children; flyers can have sign-ups and order forms attached; and groups and subgroups can be easily setup to model their real-world counterparts.

For a more analytical example of the challenges facing one segment of volunteer-driven groups, check out our previous post on "Parent volunteers coming to the rescue of US schools."

- Dave & Darren

Parent volunteers coming to the rescue of US schools

Looking broadly at the challenges facing volunteer-driven groups across the US, we believe that our school communities provide the best illustration of why increased productivity is becoming a critical driver for student and school performance.   

Parent-teacher organizations are rescuing many of the 95,000 schools in the US by performing mission critical tasks.  The problem is that they’re using 25 year old technology (emails, spreadsheets, phone calls) to do it.  They need help.  Surely we can improve how Americans spend over 36 million hours per day on volunteer-related activities or over 14 million hours per day spent on household activities related to education. Imagine moving the needle on 7% of the US and 5% of the global GDP based on Civil Society and Volunteering.

“Houston, we have a problem!”

Is our educational performance slipping on the global scale? Will incomes of our US workforce slip if we don't improve on education?

How Many Family Run Businesses At Your School?

Do you know?

There are almost 27 million small businesses in the United States, although this can include anyone who has at least some income on the side in a hobby business even if their employment is elsewhere. That's about 10% of the population.

There are almost 6 million small businesses that employ other people in the United States (roughly 2% of the population).

If you have 500 students, that would potentially translate to 50 hobby-business parents, or 10 employers.

What do you think?

Go Paperless and Save!

How much?

Based on one elementary school's experience with online registration for 500 kids (each packet has about 40 pieces of paper when all is said and done), they saved:

• $660 in printing costs
• 22,000 pieces of paper
• 1 TON in carbon footprint
• Nearly 2/3 of a tree

If we scale that up for the entire state of California, if all schools did their registration online, we'd all save:

• $10,125,000 in printing costs
• Over 12,500 metric tons of CO2 equivalents
• Over 8000 trees. Every Autumn.

And of course, this is just the Fall registration process. 

The EPA has a very thorough calculator.

 

Hello World

Welcome to the groupery's new blog!  We look forward to keeping you up to date on company news and to providing best practices regarding using the groupery software.

We also hope we can enrich your understanding of volunteerism in a way that helps keep you motivated and connects you to others in the broader volunteer community, we'll provide resources we think you might enjoy.

Thank you for visiting, and if you have something to say, rest assured we eagerly welcome your comments! For those of you unused to blogs, this is a public environment and this web page can be accessed by anyone, so please keep that in mind if you find yourself particularly passionate about a topic!