Public Relations VP

Kris Denison

Email: kris@utahpta.org

Phone: 801-261-3100

Here you will find materials you can use to help market PTA.  

You Tube Utah PTA Website

Local Movie Theater Ad

PTA Advertisement on Parent and Family Engagement That You Can All Use

UTAH PTA is striving to help local, regional and state PTA leaders advertise and encourage FAMILY Engagement at their schools by joining PTA and becoming part of the solution to our educational challenges.  We are providing this one page advertisement that can be used anywhere. Presently it is being used at the Kaysville Theater as one of their pre-movie advertisements.  We would encourage you as PTA and business leaders to seek out local movie theaters that would display this as a public service announcement.  You can also place this in newspapers, magazines and newsletters as a public service message.  We are also looking at billboard companies that would display it for us.  Remember that February is UTAH PTA Family Engagement Month and we want to push family and parent engagement in a BIG WAY!! 

Ellison Park PTA on Fox 13

The PTA has experienced more than 100 years of success in our nation as the premiere advocate and champion for our children.
Indeed it was the PTA who fought and succeeded with creating the child labor laws and it was the PTA who started the hot
school lunch program. But there is a list that goes on and on of the things that, as a powerful force for the good and well being of
children, PTA has been vital in protecting the rights of the children. In today’s world there is more need for PTA than ever before
as our educational system faces huge challenges. The need to promote our mission has never been greater. There are increasing
demands on our families and on their time to volunteer and yet study after study shows the vital impact of family engagement on
the success of a child. We need to use our PR campaigns as a call to action for parents to help in the most important thing to the
future of our communities, that of parent and family engagement. Our children are 100 % of our future. We need every voice so
that the strength and power of PTA can still make the necessary changes for good.

PLANNING A SUCESSFUL PUBLIC RELATIONS CAMPAIGN

Begin with the end in mind: When Alice meets the Cheshire cat in the well known children’s book by Lewis
Carroll, Through the Looking Glass, she is at a fork in the road that she has been traveling down. She asks the
cat, “Would you tell me please which way I ought to walk from here?” The cat answers, “That depends a good deal
on where you want to get to.” Alice responds, “I don’t much care where-.” “Then it doesn’t matter which way you
walk,” said the cat.

Have a specific goal you want to accomplish: You have just been asked to put together a 1,000 piece jigsaw
puzzle. Having done many such puzzles before, you are excited to get started. You pour out all 1,000 pieces,
spreading them out across a large table. You then pick up the lid to the box and look at what you are putting
together. But there is no picture! It’s blank. How will you ever be able to finish the puzzle without knowing what it
looks like, you wonder? Without a picture you have no clue where to even start. Have you ever tried to put together
a jigsaw puzzle without a picture? It is possible but takes a lot longer and creates a lot of frustration. Any PR
campaign has to have a clear picture of what message you want others to receive.

These principles are taught in the National Best Seller book by Sean Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.
 

Start with setting realistic goals:
   

How will you reach them:

        Decide what you want to accomplish
        Write down your goals
        Determine how results will be evaluated
        Any PR campaign should be tied with increasing membership

Decide whom you want to reach:

        Current members
        Parents of all students at the school
        Teachers and administrators
        Businesses
        Potential Partners
        Local Civic Leaders
        Others in the Community

How will you reach them:

        Media
        Newsletters (electronic and paper)
        Community posters
        Display exhibits
        Town hall meetings
        Awards
        Internet- Web Sites and e-mail
        Presentations
        Social media (Facebook, Twitter etc.)
        Faculty meetings
        City council meeting

        Chamber meetings

Delegate responsibility:

        Develop a public relations team or committee
        Assign specific tasks to be accomplished
        Report regularly

Determine if your goals were met
        Refine your campaign to increase
        Productivity and maximize communication

SOCIAL MEDIA AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

Social Media is quickly becoming one of the primary sources of information sharing.  Corporations, small businesses, government entities, charities and all community organizations recognize and use social media in ever increasing ways. Use of social media to get messages out is immediate and far reaching and allows for input and interaction of your audiences.  The benefits are significant.  As you decide to use social media there are a few things to consider.

FACEBOOK:  Like us on Facebook!  Encourage your parents to like Utah PTA on Facebook and then link your Facebook  page to the Utah PTA Facebook page and the National Facebook page so that you are getting all the information that they are putting on their pages to your membership.  This will make sure that all resources are available to every single PTA member.  Setting up a PTA facebook page is easy. Just go to the Facebook Site and fill out the information.  Place all your executive board members on as administrators so that they can all help monitor the posts that come on to your Facebook Page.  Keep your facebook page information pertinent to the function of your PTA organization so that people will want to follow you.  Make sure that your board members are responding to the posts every day.   Studies have found that the two way communication on facebook is crucial to its success.  If anyone places any undesirable information on your Facebook page you can easily go on and have them blocked from any more posts so that you can clean up who can post to your site.  You may get advertisers trying to post to your site.  Use this as a tool to acquire sponsors and partners.  Simply call them and tell them that you can not allow advertising on your PTA site but if they want to become a sponsor or partner to any of your programs or support PTA efforts at your school then you will be happy to add them and their logo to you Web site and Facebook page as a sponsor of PTA. http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Utah-PTA/369502677130

TWITTER:  Follow us on Twitter:  Also remind your PTA members to follow Utah PTA on Twitter to get important up to date information.  We will be using this in increasing ways during the Legislative session to let members know about important legislation. Many of the Utah Legislators follow Utah PTA on Twitter and we get their posts. This is also a great way to remind members about deadlines and events.Twitter is fast becoming an important way to discuss topics and get information out fast.  You link you Twitter to your Facebook so that you only have to post once. @utahpta

PINTEREST: The fastest growing Social Media site in Utah. Since so many moms and yes even dads are using Pinterest, we saw the need for us to be there also. Todays PTA is where it is at!!! This is a great way to share ideas for PTA parents, volunteers, and teachers. Join us on Pinterest today. If you are new to Pinterest, it is easy to get started. Just go to the Pinterest site and sign up to be a member and then follow Utah PTA. If you click on “about” which is on the Pinterest header and then the help button, it will give you a tutorial of how to use Pinterest and then you are on your way!! We welcome your ideas for us to use on Pinterest. We hope that you are all following Utah PTA on Facebook and Twitter. It is a great way for parents and teachers to get new and up to date information about childrens’ issues and educational issues. Every PTA member can be IN THE KNOW in Todays PTA! http://pinterest.com/utahpta/

How to manage the multiple online conversations for your business…..(and for us, your PTA)

Guest post by Kim Bale
Socialbrite

With the torrent of social media conversations coming at us today, how do you manage the flow?

The answer used to be: Painstakingly and one conversation at a time. But a new crop of social media tools aims to tamp down the social media gusher by letting you update, manage and maintain several communication outlets at once. (While it's sometimes hard to know what counts as a social media dashboard, we're not including a wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) or social media monitoring tools here.)

When selecting a dashboard for personal or professional use, you should consider such items as cost, analytics and which social networks they support, among other things. Our list is meant to feature some of the breakout social media dashboards in the space and highlight their distinguishing features to make the selection process a bit easier.

Threadsy: Unify your email, social networks

1Threadsy is an intuitive, easy-to-use dashboard that allows organizations to connect through multiple email accounts as well as Facebook and Twitter. Free to use, Threadsy is great for managing your brand from one clean dashboard across the big names in social media platforms. With no fees and no downloads, this service should make a splash in the space for both personal use and use by your business or organization.

Myweboo: Organize your information streams

2Haven't heard of Myweboo? That's OK. This upstart startup invites users to discover, browse and read popular streams and share them with friends and followers. You or your organization can choose from a wide variety of “applications” to connect to and stream to a dashboard from categories like news, social, fashion, photo and video. These streams can be viewed together of filtered from “My Dashboard” and then easily shared via Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Delicious and other networks. You're in complete control of which sites will make up your dashboard. Free to use, Myweboo is run by an appealing brother-and-sister pair of young tech stars.

Hootsuite: Integrate all your platforms

3Our personal favorite is Hootsuite because of the depth of its products and services. You can update multiple social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook and more) from a computer or iPhone, Android or Blackberry. A team of users can track results of their interactions and create a dashboard that will work efficiently with their preferred social streams. Hootsuite offers two versions. One is free and aggregates up to five social network and two RSS feeds; it stores stat history for 30 days and is ad supported. For $5.99 a month, your organization can enjoy unlimited capabilities for a single user, with each additional user costing $10 per month.

Spredfast: For teams of social marketers

4Spredfast allows an organization not only to manage its social media presence but also to monitor and measure its voice across multiple social media channels from one easy-to-use dashboard. A great choice for organizations with multiple hands in social media marketing efforts, Spredfast offers superb organizational tools that help identify and assign tasks to multiple users across multiple social media sites ranging from Facebook and Twitter to LinkedIn and blogging platforms. It also lets you publish video to many video sites at once, similar to TubeMogul. Free for 30 days, Spredfast has pricing tiers that start around $250 per month for businesses. See our recent writeup on Spredfast.

MediaFunnel: Collaborative, permission-based system

5Coordinate and manage your business's social media presence with MediaFunnel, a collaboration platform that lets you navigate and moderate online conversations about your brand. One interesting feature: You can use MediaFunnel to manage your team member's social media updates -- say, by holding your intern's tweets in a queue until approved by a supervisor (roles include admins, publishers and contributors). Chiefly geared to businesses, MediaFunnel makes it easy to combine several social media accounts and to offer solutions for presenting a brand's presence through multiple voices. Scheduled tweets, brand alerts and tweets via email or SMS are supported.

CoTweet: Advanced features for Enterprise users

6CoTweet is used by thousands of individuals and employees at enterprises around the world. The free Standard edition is limited to a few Twitter accounts and geared to a couple of team members. The paid Enterprise edition supports Facebook, too, and is geared to brands more deeply engaged in social marketing, brand building and customer support. It supports an unlimited number of users, advanced workflow, more analytics, third-party integrations -- including Salesforce.com -- productivity tools, unlimited conversation history for deeper customer relationships, a mobile app, rich profiles of fans and followers and more.

Seesmic: Free, clean & credible

7Seesmic allows users to manage unlimited Twitter accounts as well as Facebook, Google Buzz, LinkedIn and Foursquare accounts. Another free service, this dashboard is well-organized and can be sorted into a variety of timelines detailing tweets, retweets, @mentions, direct messages and lists. Seesmic also publishes trending topics, making it easy to join already popular conversations. This dashboard -- created by Loic Le Meur, founder of LeWeb, and his San Francisco-based team -- is clean, simple and affords the ability to update several statuses, send direct messages and check in to locations from one easily navigated page.

Netvibes: Share your widgets with the world

8Netvibes lets organizations keep track of the news and trends that matter, create unique personal and public dashboards and share these public dashboards or sites with anyone, anywhere, at any time. You can easily create fun and personalized widgets -- detailing the weather, to-do lists, Twitter feeds, Facebook posts or Flickr updates, among many others -- and post them to both personal and public dashboards. Businesses can choose a theme, name their pages and organize them with tabs and share them with the world.

TweetDeck: Connect with your contacts

9If you're a Twitter aficionado, you may already use TweetDeck, which works on the Mac, PC, Linux, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad and Android. It connects organizations with contacts across Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Foursquare, Google Buzz and many more. Free of charge, TweetDeck allows users to schedule future posts, manage multiple accounts and update several social media sites at once to maintain consistency. One unique feature allows users to send tweets longer than 140 characters through smart cross-posting to both a Buzz and Twitter account. Twitter is a desktop app and not Web-based, so one thing we don't like is the inability to manage the app's font size on different screens.

Brizzly: Simplify your updating

10Brizzly simplifies your social media browsing and updating experience while taking some of the work out of keeping up to date with trends and followers. It lets you update on Twitter and Facebook. Its Brizzly Guide helps explain trending topics on Twitter. Brizzly is free.

Also, don't forget other tools that can integrate your social networks:

• You might want to try using a browser as your social media dashboard. Flock has been the most social of the social browsers for the past five years. Others say Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox will get you a social media dashboard with the right add-ons/extensions. And Marc Andreessen's upcoming RockMelt (Mashable review) will take it a step further, requiring you to log into Facebook before using it.

• Unilyzer has a social media dashboard to unify yourTwitter, Facebook and YouTube accounts.

• We're impressed by the private beta of Nimble and will report back when we've used it more extensively.

• TwitterFeed lets you feed your blog to Twitter, Facebook and more.

• Ping.fm is a free service that makes it easy to update your social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr and Delicious.

• RowFeeder is a tool to cross-post, to track conversations on Twitter and Facebook and to create analytical reports.

Experiment with the different ways to get your message out and find out the best ways to meet your PTA needs.  You need to start out simple and make sure that your board and members are comfortable using the tools that you incorporate.  There are Computer Geeks in every PTA.  Find out who knows a lot about using social media and other web based tools and invite them to help you and your board create your own marketing portfolio.

PUBLIC RELATIONS is Exploding into the Future

Every PTA unit on every level needs a Public Relations Vice president who works intimately with the President and the executive board.  As technology and communications have changed, it is crucial that we use all the available sources at our fingertips to reach out and touch every family that we can with the PTA mission.  Our mission is a strong foundation on which we can help and sustain families and strengthen the future of Education for every child. Public Relations should:

1.       Let parents know how vital PTA is at their school in giving them a voice and a roll in the education of their child

2.       Create a spirit of Parent Involvement at your school

3.       Showcase your school

4.       Get parents excited and involved in school events

5.       Reach out to the community and better involve the community at your school

6.       Invite the media to promote your school

7.       Use all social media sources to communicate

8.       Be a link with your school as an information highway into the home.

9.       Create an atmosphere where every parent feels welcome and a part of the school community

We want to offer our Utah PTA Commercial with well known BYU Basketball star Jimmer Fredette to you to show at your school to promote the Three for Me Program with your parents.  Jimmer was recently drafted into the NBA to play for the Sacramento Kings. If we can get every parent to commit to join PTA and to give just three hours a year to be in the school helping then we can make a huge impact in education that will ripple out and help every child.  You can view and download the commercial on You Tube at:

http://youtu.be/s-MAAUB2IvA

or contact Kris Denison at kris@utahpta.org  to request a video. 

Banner Order for Utah PTA Banners

Banners are Two feet by Five feet on vinyl with grommets for hanging.  They will have the Utah PTA logo on them as well as the National PTA logo and the school name printed underneath.  It you wish to further customize the Banners an additional set up fee may be required.  You will have to call Kris Denison to arrange for custom Banners at 801-261-3100. We have already paid the set up fee for the existing pattern. Money for the banner has to be received in the state PTA office with this form before we can order the banner for you. Banners can be mailed to you or sent with the Region Director at your request. Mailing the banners will cost an extra $5.00 for postage and handling.

Please mail all orders to: Banners @Utah PTA 5192 South Greenpine Drive Salt Lake City, Utah 84123

Name of PTA President ___________________________________________________________

PTA President Phone number ______________________________________________________

PTA President E-mail ______________________________________________________________

Name of school for Banner _________________________________________________________

(Please put the name exactly as you wish it to be placed on the Banner)

Address of School ________________________________________________________________

Region number ________________________ Check number _____________________________

Date sent _____________________________ Amount sent ______________________________

Number of Banners Ordered _____________________

Mailing address for the Banner ______________________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________________

Indicate here if you want the banner sent with the Region Director _______________

****Each Banner will cost $38.00 if you need it mailed you need to add $5.00 for postage and handling

You may also purchase the Ten Reasons to join PTA Banner for an additional $35.00  Yes or no