Hello, I have been elected secretary for our school's PTA for 2012-2013, but I've NEVER done it before! Ahh! I'm told it's fairly simple and a good stepping stone to other positions on the board. I will be in charge of recording and keeping the minutes of the meetings, but another responsibility is the quarterly newsletter. This is where I am at a loss. Does anyone know how to creatively make one, what program to use to accomplish this? Any advice/help in this direction is greatly appreciated!
as a mom i say just keep it simple, we get so much paper work, just hit the highlights and look at it as a way to advertise all the good you do for the kids and the school.
I did a quaterly newsletter for about 5 years and used Powerpoint.
Things I included were Save the Dates. Info from various committees regarding volunteers or supplies needed. Reminders of fundraisers coming up as well as asking for Box Tops, Campbell's labels etc. Let people know how much fundraisers are making and where the money is going. Also included pictures of various events sponsored by pta. (mine was an HSA)
In this day of technology, it would be great it you could get email addresses for all parents and also put the newsletter on the school website. For parents that do not have access to email or a computer, you could print limited copies and send them home with a specific child.
Word has templates for Newsletters on it already - that would be a good place to start. Keep the Newsletter to ONE page, keep it to the facts and keep it informational.
My co-president and I started a weekly newsletter this year when we started, and it's been very well received. It's actually very basic in terms of design, as it does go out every week so the only information is what we need people to know at that time. I use plain old Microsoft Word docs, put it in a font I like (Optima), inserted our logo up top, bold the vital bits we want people to read, and separate the items with a simple yellow line. Before you get into the formatting, think about how much information you'll be including, and what kind. For us, it was timely happenings at school, most items were less than 5 sentences. What are you going to be reporting? How long are those items going to be? Will you jazz it up with images or is it just text?
No matter how long it's going to be, you can probably find a good template in Word, if you're using that. Any standard word processing program should give you enough formatting to make a decent newsletter. I'd say don't over-think the design, the information is the most important part, as long as it's readable and clear, your members will be happy to hear from you!
