As president of her kids’ school’s PTA, Enviro Girl has printed out reams of paper to get the word out about meeting agendas, sock hops, silent auctions and fund-raisers. She’s used up a small fortune in printer ink (it’s funny to think that designer perfume costs less than a comparative amount of printer ink) and while she’s bought paper made from recycled products, it’s still a lot of paper (and a LOT of trees).
But bringing people out to participate in the PTA without paper hand outs required some patience and ingenuity. Here’s how the Happyland Elementary PTA has replaced paper:
1. No longer sending out flyers trying to recruit parents. Instead, members attend the Pre-Kindergarten and Kindergarten orientations and talk up their organization to new parents on the spot. This is targeted recruiting, since most of those parents have young children and aren’t committed to other things…yet. Instead of wasting your resources on everybody, be smart about your efforts and focus only on those people.
2. Instead of sending home regular reminders that they need volunteers (which made them look desperate to boot), they send out one form at the start of the school year asking what people would like to volunteer to do. Returned forms are compiled on a spreadsheet with contact information. Getting volunteers for, say, a sock hop, is easy–people said back in September they’d be willing to help, so it’s a matter of making phone calls off a spreadsheet that can be organized by activity for efficient targeting of volunteers. Each committee chairperson gets a copy of the spreadsheet emailed to them, further reducing the paper the organization used.
3. No more paper agendas or meeting minutes! Enviro Girl set up a blog for free using WordPress. On this blog she created different pages: PTA by-laws, links to the school and district and other relevant sites for parents to explore, and then the blog feature runs updates, like meeting minutes and agendas. Parents can subscribe to the site to get automatic updates. The paper version of agendas and minutes are still available if people ask for them, but consider this: 6 years ago Enviro Girl printed and distributed 85 agendas and minutes each month. Now she prints and distributes 15.
4. Getting parents to the group’s website didn’t work 100%, so another parent set up a Facebook page for the organization. That social network tool worked really well–pulling in younger parents through a virtual word of mouth and spreading information about PTA events through a grapevine many people connect to on a daily basis.
5. Finally, for $15 the Happyland Elementary PTA bought their domain name so help parents easily find them online. Anything any parent needs to know is literally at their fingertips if they can get on the internet.
Enviro Girl’s oldest son is a Boy Scout. The parent information is emailed regularly to her inbox, but she sure wishes they’d create a website to keep people informed. Sometimes she accidentally deletes important information, like camping dates. She also notices many parents printing out the emails which sort of defeats the purpose of using email. Finally, the parents get the emails, which doesn’t necessarily insure the boys will stay informed. The boys are dependent on their parents passing information along since most of them don’t go on their parents’ email accounts. Enviro Girl is convinced that setting up a site or Facebook page would solve their communication problems; anyone who needed information at any time could grab it and it would be easy to link to official Boy Scout pages and sites.
Websites and Facebook are better than email and less wasteful than paper when it comes to communicating with a group. People can still enjoy a fair amount of privacy with different setting controls, yet if getting the word out is your group’s priority, you need to start sharing your information online. Using websites and Facebook reduces waste and paper use and they are free, ultimately saving your organization money in the long run.
Tell the Eco Women, have you ditched paper as a primary mode of communication for large groups and organizations?
Want to read more about just how green a school can be? 
Before The Green Mommy started wearing a cape and officially began protecting the planet, she was a fifth grade teacher for 15 years. She worked hard to educate her students and often that meant being creative with how she did so. She had organized boxes of “bits and do-dads” to make science, math, and history hands-on. These were things that she came across herself (that others didn’t see the potential in) and were given to her (by those who did). She was “green” then without even knowing it.
