Your PTA membership in the time of Covid

PTAs

27 May 2020

Clare Jenner is the Membership Experience Manager at Parentkind.

In these ever changing times, we are being asked about the need to renew membership while PTAs aren’t able to hold events. So, we wanted to take this chance to show you that your PTA membership is much more than insurance cover.

Let’s get that out of the way first. Insurance cover is important and still necessary. If you are using Parentkind’s model constitution, it contains a clause to say that committee members are responsible for making sure the association has adequate insurance in place. Even if you don’t have our constitution, yours may have a similar clause. The policy, provided by Zurich Insurance Company Ltd also includes cover for any PTA owned property and cash cover (who’s got money in the school safe right now?) You can find information about all the cover and levels in the Insurance Summary document in the My Account area on the website.

As your membership organisation, there’s lots more to your membership:

Website

If you haven’t already logged in to the website, now is the time! You can register here. Once you’re in, check out the My Account area to make sure we have all your details up to date and correct. You can also find your PTA membership documents, including the insurance information provided by Zurich Insurance Company Ltd and there’s a facility for you to add your own documents, like your constitution and minutes, so all the committee members can access them.

Advice Hub

The advice hub contains a huge range of information sheets, templates and resources. We review these regularly to make sure they are up-to-date and relevant. If the queries we get in highlight something’s missing, we work on that – who best to tell us what we need than our members? Subjects include, governance, health and safety, fundraising, GDPR and how to communicate with your members. We also work with other bodies, like the Charity Commission, HMRC and licensing bodies to make sure you know everything you need to know.

Charity Registration

If your association isn’t a registered charity, we can help with that too. We have a PTA charity registration to registering as a charity and a pre-approved constitution template.

Membership Services Team

Our Membership Services Team are still working from home right now so if you have any queries, they are there to answer. Contact them on 0300 123 5460 or [email protected]

And there’s more…

easyfundraising is a fantastic way of non-event fundraising. All of us are using the internet so much more for shopping and this is a great way to raise funds for your PTA at the same time. When a member signs up to support your cause, a huge number of retailers give back a percentage of what they spend to your PTA. The percentages may not seem a lot, but if you can get several parents doing it, their donations add up with minimal effort from you. And it costs them nothing! easyfundraising also have lots of helpful resources to help you promote your cause, including pre-populated Facebook or Twitter posts.
Grant funding — Raising money via grants may also be an option for your association now – especially as you may have more time to concentrate on the applications. We have information in our PTA Advice hub about grant applications and we have partnered with Fundsonline and Grants4Schools to give you free or discounted access to a large number of grant giving bodies.
Educare is an online training platform and our PTA members get discounted courses on things your PTA may need such as Food Hygiene, First Aid, Fire Safety.. You may find your members are itching to learn something new at the minute!
Suppliers Directory – Once everyone is back up and running events, we also have a suppliers directory, discounted film licensing, discounted raffle tickets. We are constantly working to find partners to work with to provide whatever our PTAs needs, better still if it’s discounted!

Tell us more

We are talking to our members more, finding out how Covid lockdown is affecting you as parents and as PTAs. We currently have a survey for PTA members which we’d love you to complete. The parent research we did recently can be found here, this information was passed on to the DfE and major teaching unions.

What’s really important right now is to keep communicating. Make sure all of your committee are signed up to receive our member newsletter so you all learn what’s happening first of all. And talk to us too. We are really proud of Parentkind and the benefits the membership offers but we are doing it for you. If there’s something missing, tell us; if there’s something you want to see, we need to know. Use our Facebook page to talk to us. We introduced a PTA Facebook Hangout group for you to talk to us and each other. We are also working on a programme of webinars and we’d love some feedback from you on what subjects you would like us to cover.

We are all looking at the future to work out what our ‘new normal’ looks like, but rest assured that we will be there working with you to make sure we’re all ready for whatever that will be.