Parent-Teacher Conference Scheduling - Best Practice from NY

One of the things that I love about  VolunteerSpot is that our customers are so tremendously helpful and share new ways to use our simple signup tool!  Get a bunch of volunteers and volunteer leaders together in a room, or online, as the case may be, and some wonderful good is going to come out of it!

Typically, a teacher (or a home room parent) sets up a parent-teacher conference singup for his or her class.  A very creative parent leader in New York took our signup tool to heart, added a dash of website customization, and made a very smooth parent-teacher conference scheduling dashboard for his ENTIRE school! Michael, THANK YOU for your creativity and for sharing your best practice with our VolunteerSpot community.  Here's what he did...

As an Organizer, Michael used the Plan Now Wizard in VolunteerSpot to plan a parent-teacher conference signup for each teacher, using the times/days they requested.  Each teacher's conference schedule was planned as a unique activity and given the teacher's name.  For each activity, he generated a URL link to invite parents to signup.

Now comes the fun part -- Michael created a parent-teacher conference page on the school website linking each teacher's signup URL to his or her name.  He then created a help-page showing parents step-by-step what to expect. Here's the parent instructions below (click to see full-screen).  I blocked-out teacher names for confidentially purposes.

 
 

Next, Michael did a terrific job of communicating with parents about what to expect.  He sent out an email letting parents know that parent-teacher conference scheduling would be automated online this year, using VolunteerSpot. Just to cover all the bases, he included this set of screen shots, to show parents exactly what they would be doing to signup.  

Kudos Michael - great work and thanks for sharing!!

Comments

[Angela J]

I'm just thrilled to see how well this works! I've been scheduling Parent Conferences for my classroom for the last 10 years and the back and forth with the parents to fit their work obligations, changing times, etc takes HOURS! I can see that this will really help the parents schedule themselves making us both much happier!!