Early childhood learning programs thrive when teachers and parents collaborate. Getting parents engaged and involved at your school is challenging and that’s why ECE leaders are coming together on Twitter Wednesday night at 9:00pm ET to discuss this topic. You should join the conversation. Here’s the deal.

The conversation is going to take place on a Twitter chat with the hashtag of #ECEtechCHAT. Fran Simon (the host of these Twitter chats) provides some guiding questions for the discussion Wednesday night:

1) Parent engagement and involvement are very different. What role does technology play in connecting with parents? What is the role of social media? What about other tools?

2) How do you use or envision technology being used to engage and involve parents?

3) What do you do to narrow the digital divide for parents/families?

4) What are the best applications (that means Internet systems as well as apps),devices, and processes for engaging and involving parents?

New to Twitter Chats?

Twitter chats are really easy. If you’ve never participated I would go straight to TweetChat and follow their instructions on how to participate in a Twitter chat. TweetChat makes it really simple to participate. Remember, the hashtag is: #ECETechCHAT

Why You Should Participate?

Chats are a great way to connect with smart and influential people . You’re going to come away with a handful of new ideas, new tools to checkout, links to follow and articles to read. You’ll make new friends, increase your Twitter follower count and should you participate and ask questions your name will get mentioned a lot…which is above all…just FUN!

Why I’ll Be There

Using technology to engage parents is exactly what MemberHub is helping an increasing number of preschools and childcare centers across the country (and a few in Europe too) do. This is an important topic and we have a lot to learn too.

See you Wednesday at 9:00pm ET!

In our last post we established that Early Childhood Learning programs can and should use the standards put forth in NAEYCs accreditation process as a benchmark for which to compare their communication efforts. At the end of that post we suggested that the type of communication channels you provide can be the difference between 1-way communication and real communication, two-way communication. So what are the strategies that you put into place to foster parent-teacher collaboration? Let’s look back at the standards.

Standard 7.A.14 requires that:

“Program staff and families work together to plan events.  Families’ schedules and availability are considered as part of this planning.”

I want to pause on here. This is real nuts-n-bolts sort of stuff here. Staff and families will work together to plan events.  Staff and parents must communicate their schedules to each other and then they must collaborate to plan events. I know for many programs that this is a challenge. It’s hard enough to even get parents to read your emails, right? Keep in mind that NAEYC is an accreditation process. So the bar has to be raised a bit here.

Don’t Do That

Now to be fair, I’m not running a child care center (although I have felt like that on a few occasions) but I will assert that the challenge to get parents, families and members to volunteer is universal to all organizations. What I will also assert is that the easier and more convenient you make it for folks to communicate then the easier it will be for them to plan.  You know those pieces of paper that you create for parents to sign up on when they drop off their kids? Yea, that’s not convenient. Parents are busy and might not have their collective thoughts or schedules in front of them. Our customers use  Whiteboards to create virtual sign-up sheets so parents can signup at their leisure, when they have time in front of the computer. Also, you know those long emails that you send to everyone in the class and have everyone reply with what they’re bringing? Yea, don’t do that either. Again, the Whiteboards feature in Memberhub or any other wiki-like tool will allow you to create virtual signup sheets. The point here is planning anything is much easier when you use technology to guide the process.

In-person Communication Alternatives

Standard 7.B.06 says:

“Program staff communicate with families on at least a weekly basis regarding children’s activities and developmental milestones, shared caregiving issues, and other information that affects the well-being and development of their children.  Where in-person communication is not possible, program staff communicate through established alternative means.”

If you can’t meet face-to-face then make sure you have established alternative means. Now that one’s easy enough for folks to digest. An “alternative” could be email, text messages, social media, phone calls, carrier pigeon, whatever. I would challenge this standard to go a bit further and suggest that the “established alternative” be whatever communication channels the parents are most comfortable with and to have multiple channels. Effective group communication must use multiple mediums. I would also suggest that the standard go beyond just having those alternate communication channels and encourage those channels be used often so that REAL community and relationships can be built when there actually is face-to-face time.

Make the Most of Face-to-Face Time

I’ll end with this. If you’re a director or teacher and if every single time you are with parents you find yourself discussing logistics (next conference, field trip, what wacky Wednesday is, etc.) then I would suggest that you have room to improve your communication efforts. Technology should be used for logistics and collaboration so that when are face-to-face you can talk about things that actually matter. Like the weather (kidding!).

Does your organization hold up effective communication as an important strategy to success? How do you measure how effective your communication efforts are? (Actually I really would love to know how you’re doing that, leave a comment). In many cases, leaders will look to successful organizations and mimic their communication efforts and styles. Well in the case of Early Childhood Education (ECE), you can strive to live up to the standards. You know, the NAEYC standards.

NAEYC places very strong emphasis on the importance of reciprocal relationships with families and communication.  NAEYC Early Childhood Program Accreditation Criteria for Relationships Standard 1.A.01 says:

“Teachers work in partnership with families, establishing and maintaining regular, ongoing, two-way communication.”

Did you catch that? Two-way communication. Blasting your parents and families with emails, newsletters and take home progress reports is important but it can easily become a 1-way channel. If that’s all you’re doing then parents should feel informed but will they feel engaged? What channels have you opened up for parents to communicate back? How easy do you make it for them to share and are you encouraging them to do that? Are you using technology to make collaboration easier?

What if Parents Say Nasty Things?

A flag might be going off in your head right now. If we start encouraging parents and families to give feedback and share ideas, won’t we open up the door for a flood of “suggestions” and “complaints”. Maybe. Maybe not. MemberHub customers report that parents empowered to communicate through our private online portal generally improves collaboration and results in more positive interaction. The important point here is that these communications channels should be about collaboration, not just another 1-way channel. If you don’t take the bad with the good, you’ll never have true collaboration.

You Reap What you Sow

Create a feedback line and you’ll get…feedback. Give a phone number and you’ll get phone calls. Create a place for parents to have discussions and you’ll get discussions! Create an easy way for them to signup to serve and share ideas and (ideally) you’ll get parents that volunteer! I know that sounds easier said then done, but if you define the guidelines up front then 99% of the time people follow the rules. That one parent is going to find a way to vent no matter what. But, chances are, with encouraged reciprocal communication tools like MemberHub, parents are more likely to be positively engaged and less likely to feel frustrated enough that they feel the need to vent publicly. Surely nothing is stopping a parent from going on Facebook right now and saying inappropriate things, but that could be worse than them venting inside a private MemberHub portal!

Many programs worry that parents and teachers use social media inappropriately in ways that undermines a sense of community, rather than building it. With a private online community, you can define the tone of the discussion to be constructive and helpful, maintain confidentiality and ensure a respectful dialogue.

We’ve introduced an enhancement to events in MemberHub. Events can now have a map associated with them. When someone clicks on the event link inside a MemberHub calendar if an address has been provided, there will be a link to a Google map. Clicking that link will open a new tab with a large Google map for someone to easily view and get directions. This link will also get included in event notification and reminder emails. 

To generate a map, simply provide an address (or really anything that has a known location to Google) in the new Address of Event field. Once you tab out of that field a map will automatically be generated and placed in the right-hand sidebar.

Okay…enjoy!

In accordance with their 10-year commitment to the Pre-K Now campaign, Pew has just released their final report (PDF) which reveals significant increase in investment from state funding for Pre-k over the last 10 years and makes a very clear case for the support of a well-funded early eduction system in America. 

Investing in Early Childhood Eduction is extremely important for this country. Nothing could produce a greater ROI for a country than investing in its children’s education and the expansion of early education is perhaps the best way to deal with the inequality our country is facing in light of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Two Observations

I’m not sure what a federal backed ECE system looks like, but I can tell you two things:

1. I’m personally seeing the results of a strong ECE program in my children’s lives and I’m very thankful for it. I hope their public education can accelerate in accordance with how early their education has started.

2. We’re committed to ensuring that MemberHub.com exists to serve the ECE community and the organizations that already support it like churches and nonprofits. Increasing communication and collaboration among teachers and parents will be a big part of making early childhood education really work well!

Pew’s Got a Plan

The report ”challenges the nation’s policy makers to transform public education by moving away from the current K-12 system to a Pre-K-12 system”. In their actual report, Pew provides a roadmap for Pre-k-12 which includes:

• Strategically expanding access to pre-k
• Incorporating early education research and best practices into learning standards and teaching practices
• Improving assessments for teachers and children
• Re-imagining state and federal governance in a Pre-K-12 system

This graphic shows the proof in state spending growth (click the image):

Perhaps your preschool, church or nonprofit has some room to improve communication efforts in 2012 and you’re wondering if MemberHub can help. Well, now is the time to get started with our big end of year coupon.

It’s really simple…start a FREE 30-day trial with us in December and when 2012 hits save 50% off the first 3 months with the coupon below! That’s a $150 savings on a Large plan!

Use the blue button to the right to start a free trial ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~>

If you’ve already got a trial going then just select your plan asap and use coupon code: DEC11PROMO

We used to allow any user in MemberHub to edit their family members…but long story short, it became unwieldy. So we gave control over setting up families strictly to admins. However, we’ve had many customers (mainly churches) that have wanted to give the responsibility back to their members to configure their families and help setup the member directory. So, we’ve added it back.

The feature is much smarter now and should hopefully cut down on some of the setup challenges that admins were left with once their members started editing their family members in their portal.

Watch the video below and you can also check out the Knowledge Base article at http://help.memberhub.com/kb/users-guide/setting-up-your-family

MemberHub YouTube Channel

By the way, we’re starting a YouTube channel for all sorts of videos at http://youtube.com/MemberHubVideos. Yeah, it’s pretty lame right now with one video, but we’ll be adding more!

What do you think?

Wednesday morning I had  coffee with Sarah Willcox from the N.Center for Nonprofits. I left our meeting feeling refreshed, inspired and encouraged to continue our search for how we can help nonprofits. Here’s 3 things that every nonprofit and business can learn from “the Center”.

1. Be Willing to Change

It’s been two years since I’ve met with anyone from the Center. If there’s one thing that is evident it’s that there has been change. Good, fruitful change that’s making a difference and effecting everything from morale to retention rates (the lifeblood of any subscription based product or service). One change they made was to reengineer their organizational structure. It sounds like team members were given the opportunity to revisit their strengths, passions and desires to serve the Center. Titles were changed, responsibilities were shifted and the result was more defined roles that built paths for staff to set personal goals and achieve success in their position. Surely not every organization has the flexibility or audacity to perform such a challenge, but perhaps whatever wall is preventing you from at least exploring this idea should be removed.

2. Remember Why You Exist

Here’s the bottom line for the N.C. Center for Nonprofits. It lies in their name. It’s not the word “North Carolina”. It’s not “Center” and it’s not even “Nonprofits”. The most important word in their organization’s name is “for”. Perhaps you didn’t notice it in the logo above or each time I’ve written it, but this word is italicized on purpose. It’s important. The Center exists for Nonprofits. They’re really getting back to their roots and recalling that they exist for Nonprofits. So what have they done? They’ve picked up the phone to talk to them. They now call every new member and every single member that renews each year. They talk to them about their needs, their struggles and sometimes just to shoot the breeze. Sure it takes some time, but they’ve seen a 10% increase in member renewals. That’s HUGE. Remember why you exist. It’s probably to help people, right? Well be human about the way you help them.

3. Serve With a Glad Heart

It is evident that Sarah and the rest of the team at The Center have a renewed sense of why and who the serve. She shared with me some fascinating statistics about the nonprofit sector in North Carolina. Would you have guessed that nonprofits provide more than 400,000 jobs in North Carolina? That’s 10% of the workforce. Crazy. Anyway, my point is that I felt a sense of joy coming from Sarah in the work that she does. She serves (nonprofits as it were) with happiness! The most inspiring organizations are often the ones whose team’s sacrificial serving shows through. If someone on your team is not serving with gladness of heart then perhaps they have a different passion that needs to be fueled.

What Else?

Perhaps you’ve learned some things yourself from the Center or have some other reminders for nonprofits. I hope you’ll share in the comments below.

I recently ran into a post with excerpts from best selling author, Seth Godin on the public education system. In the video Mr. Godin asserts that the public school system in America is teaching children to “aim low”.

Consider his comment:

This is why so many people who call themselves entrepreneurs really aren’t. This is why it’s so difficult for somebody to start a business that really grows. It’s why every time we look at 6-yr old, or a 8-yr old or a 12-yer old, what we’re seeing is someone whose been trained over and over and over again to push for smaller assignments…to figure out how to hand stuff in at the very last minute…to, whenever possible, go for the inch instead of the mile.

Mr. Godin raises many tough questions:

• Are public schools really teaching kids to just stay in line instead of dream big?
• How do we teach our kids to be artistic and measure their progress?
• Would America have more “real” entrepreneurs if we home-schooled?
• Is the public school system to blame for all the anger behind Occupy Wall Street?

I’ve got to say, Mr Godin’s comments left so many questions for me personally because I’m a father of young children, a product of the North Carolina public school system, and an aspiring entrepreneur (Yes, I’m the co-founder of MemberHub).

Lisa Nielsen, of The Innovative Educator (a fabulous resource for any ECE specialist), sums up that second video quite nicely in her post titled Seth Godin Discusses Failure of Education Model.

Godin explains that it wouldn’t take very many passionate parents to start schools down the right path. Parents just need to realize that they and their children own the learning and they are not the property of the government.

Photo courtesy of U.S. Army’s Photostream

We need to

Lastly, if you’re interested in learning how you can maximize your communication efforts among teachers and parents please check out http://memberhub.com/schools and contact us with any questions!