Live in Your World, Play in Ours

This is the last year that Anastasia Miller and Jennifer McLennan can volunteer their time to Stoddert PTA communications. We need new volunteers to take over sending email announcements every week and updating the website.

The tools are already set up, and Anastasia and Jennifer will train the new team.

The ideal candidate(s) to do the announcements would have some experience with an email delivery system. We use MailChimp, but experience with any other system (like Constant Contact, Emma, etc.) would translate well. Putting together the announcements entails sending a reminder email once a week to the school administration and the PTA executive committee; collecting Dr. Cuthbert’s weekly message, email submissions, and links to new web posts into the body of the email; and updating the calendar. Light editing and some email followup with event organizers for details is usually necessary. Jennifer and Anastasia alternate weeks putting the mail out; the total time commitment is—at most—about two to three hours per week.

The stoddert.org website is a WordPress site. It is very easy to maintain and post articles. Our goal is to encourage the entire Stoddert audience to use the website rather than stuffing paper in backpacks; to comment, suggest and write articles, add photos and video, work with teachers to publish classroom information, and generally use the site as a public forum. We will undertake some improvements to the site over the summer to make it even more useful to parents, teachers, and the community. Candidates for the website should have, at a minimum, basic familiarity with website commenting, enthusiasm for communications (and for Stoddert!), and one to two hours per week to devote. This is also a fine job to share.

Please contact Anastasia Miller (anastasia [at] stoddert [dot] org) or Jennifer McLennan (jennifer.mclennan [at] comcast [dot] net) with questions. We’d like to have volunteers lined up by the end of July, so that we can begin putting out announcements in advance of the 2011-2012 school year.