I’ve been completely ignoring my blog and focusing on everyone else’s because, well, I don’t know. Because it’s more interesting for me to work with brands and bloggers and play matchmaker. The last couple of weeks I’ve been working with Monday Envelope and the timing is perfect. It’s a website that allows team and room parents to send group alerts, manage calendars, collect money and basically get some of your life back after you’ve made the mistake of volunteering to be room mom again, thinking you have the time and talent to get things done and then finding out that you don’t. Rather, you still don’t.
In any event, if you want to read up on Monday Envelope the best thing to do is just go to their homepage. It’s surprisingly straightforward for a site that does so much. Or, if you want to you can read what Trudi or Sondra had to say because they’re both better writers than I am, also those are blogs you might want to subscribe to. They’re kind of rad and they’re both women who I love to hang out with.
I’ve decided to use rad as much as possible this week because it irritates my kids and my friend Mike.
Back to Monday Envelope. I thought the site was a good match for Word of Mouth Women because I’m room parent in two schools now. I’ve been room parent in one class or another and most often both for 10 years. Because room parenting requires you to send mass cc emails I’ve had to set up a zillion different email addresses or risk having my work email blocked as spam. If you try bcc’ing 70 email addresses you’re doomed and it will absolutely land in spam. If you don’t bcc you end up with a disaster that every mom is familiar with.
I’ve used a lot of different things. Once upon a time I used big tent and they pretty good but then sort of changed direction and became more community and less communication. I sometimes use mail chimp because it lets me know if emails have been read or bounced.
This year we’re using Monday Envelope because when you’re in a K-8 school a lot happens in 8th grade and we need a robust calendar, we need a way to share and store documents and we need to be able to get our volunteers in motion.
The folks at Monday Envelope are giving away $200. $100 to a blog reader, anyone who enters this contest really and $100 to the PTA/PTO/sports league that the winner chooses. They only requirement is that everything is in the US and that there’s a non profit that Monday Envelope can send the $100 to. It’s super easy to enter and if you love the idea of your school getting a cash infusion here in the first weeks of the year be sure to tell your friends to enter.
And then next week I promise to write about my new obsession. Dog blood. I cannot stop thinking about it and I think you’ll be interested too.
This is so wonderful! I’m going to tell the boys teachers, principal & PTA President about this on Monday. I think I’ll also use this for my Team Parent responsibilities. Do you know if it allows for photo sharing amongst group members? That way, we can avoid using the AYSO staple, Shutterfly.
Stephanie! Hey, I think we already corresponded re: this via FB. Now I know how you found us. Yay Jessica! I’m going to post the same answer here (why waste good brain cells).
We’re taking a hard look at how to provide the best
photo sharing experience for our groups while protecting privacy. It’s a
feature that will be coming this year but first, we wanted to make sure
we had covered all the bases in terms of communication, volunteering
and fundraising.
If it can eliminate the pesky troublemaker parent who always seems to derail any progress, I’m in…