5 Steps to Creating a Marketing Plan

All of your PTA projects, events, mailings, and communications should have a marketing plan to support the effort. A marketing plan serves as a roadmap for how you’ll inform members and potential members about your activities, products, and achievements.
Formal marketing plans may be broken into five steps.

1. Conduct a Program/Product Analysis—A successful plan begins with analyzing your local PTA’s existing products, activities, and services. Your analysis should answer these basic questions:

• What goods or services do people want/need/expect your PTA to offer? (Ask yourself what are your most successful events and activities, your least successful, what new services could be offered, etc.)
• What will motivate people to continue to want/buy PTA goods and services?
• What might prevent people from wanting/buying PTA goods or services?
• Is it cost effective to offer the PTA good or service? (Consider cost of promotions, number of volunteers needed, time to organize/run it, return on the invested amount of money and time, etc.)

2. Set Realistic & Measurable Goals—Clearly define what you want your marketing efforts to accomplish and by when. This step helps you set realistic and measurable goals for your marketing efforts. A good, measurable example would be: “Increase membership by 5 percent by December 1.”

3. Select Marketing Strategies—Choose methods that will most effectively let people know of your PTA’s goods or services. When selecting the best promotion methods, keep your target customers in mind—those who are most likely to want or buy what you are offering—and choose methods, within your budget range, that will reach them. Remember, you may have to use a combination of methods and repeat your promotion several times before people will act on it.

4. Create an Action Plan—Define the Who, What, When, and How of your marketing plan. Your action plan should detail what will be done, when it will begin and be completed, who will accomplish the tasks, and how much it will cost (in materials, volunteers, hours, etc.).

5. Measure and Evaluate Results—Decide how you will measure success and what you will do with those results. This step is often overlooked in the planning stages but is invaluable in helping PTAs determine what worked and what didn’t, and what could be improved.

These steps can help reveal what your PTA does best, and help determine if a program or service should be improved or discontinued. Recognizing and letting go of unsuccessful programs or activities is one of the hardest things for PTAs to do. Try to identify your best PTA projects and put your energy and resources behind them—it is better to do a few well-organized projects than many poorly attended or under-funded events.

Marketing Strategies

• Concentrate resources and efforts on the top-rated programs; each event/activity also provides a means to renew and recruit members.
• Use membership ads as part of a coordinated campaign effort; create letters, membership forms, posters, and other items with the campaign theme: “Become part of something that works. Join your PTA.”
• Hold PTA business meetings in combination with other regularly scheduled school events or offer special parent seminars on such topics as homework help, test taking, college savings plans, etc.
• Ask each member to bring one potential new member to the next school event/PTA meeting; ask each volunteer to recruit one additional volunteer for each event/activity.
• To gain understanding and support for paying dues, distribute PTA’s proposed budget to members and nonmembers with the date of the meeting where the budget will be approved ($XX for each project, $XX for insurance, $XX for state and national service fees, etc.); create a fact sheet with the proposed budget on one side and descriptions, benefits, and highlights of the top-rated PTA programs on other side.
• To replace the PTA newsletter, coordinate with the school to add one page of news to themonthly calendar or other communications sent to families (e.g., mailings, website, e-mail, etc.); include highlights of member participation to acknowledge volunteers and encourage others to join.

For more information, consult the ways to use PTA membership marketing materials.