All about the numbers

Automatically generated from the audio, so it may not be perfectly word-for-word.

Hi, welcome to the PTA Podcast. My name is Vaughn, and I've been a PTA volunteer for a few years now. PTAs are becoming even more crucial in PK schools together. And I find it fascinating to talk to other volunteers about the different approaches they take. So please join me in this podcast to share information, generate ideas, debate issues, and celebrate success. And I hope that you can take something away for your PTA today. So this is just a short one just to uh kind of stay in touch. It's the holidays right now, it's February, half-term holidays, and like every other parent I suspect in the country, I have a cold. My children came home on the last day of term and brought me a cold, which is so kind of them. Um we I don't know about you, but we've had a a run on so many illnesses in our part of the country in the last few weeks. We've had sickness bugs, we've had flu like symptoms, we've had various forms of colds and viruses, and a lot of children off sick from school and a lot of illness in my house, and so now I'm going to enjoy my half-time holiday with a cold, thanks to my children. But I have also managed to find some time to sit down and read my magazine over the holidays, which has been lovely. I have um this magazine on a subscription, so I get one once a month, but I have to be honest, I rarely get a chance to sit and read a few pages. Usually um, I just go through it looking at the pictures, which are lovely pictures by the way, um, thinking, oh, those look like interesting articles and recipes. I'll read that properly later, but of course, later never comes, and before I know it, next month's magazine is plopping onto my doormat, and the cycle repeats itself. So um, it's not often I actually get done to sit down and get to read my magazine, but this time I have managed to read some articles, and one of them caught my attention, which I really wanted to share with you because I thought it could be used as an idea for a PTA. So the magazine that I have on subscription is called The Simple Things, and the article I'm going to talk to you about appears in the February 2026 version, and it's called Change by Numbers. And the premise of the article is to encourage you to make small changes to your life or your weekly or daily routine that could really benefit yourself directly or benefit the environment or maybe your local community. Um, and what they have done in this article is instead of it being a massive block of text, they have broken it up by putting in giant numbers through the article, and each number relates to a different small change that you can make to benefit something else. So, for example, they have uh number one, they have um an initiative which is trying to get people to use um to take reusable coffee cups to uh a coffee shop instead of getting it the takeaway cup. It's called the coffee cup challenge, and the actual challenge that they're talking about is to pledge for getting people to pledge to use one reusable coffee cup throughout September. Um, it's a small change they're trying to encourage people to make, obviously, to build a habit of taking your reusable cup more often than just September, but obviously you need to start somewhere, so that's where they're starting there. Then against the big number three, they have highlighted um a challenge called Take Three for the Sea, which is trying to encourage people who visit the beach to come home with three pieces of litter that you might find on the beach, and if every person does that, then um that's gonna really help to keep the beach uh clean and tidy. Um so they've highlighted just three pieces of rubbish, that's all you need to bring home. Then against um five, they have written uh a challenge called Five for a Friend, which is where you might dedicate five minutes of your time to helping other people, so that could be just a quick phone call to a relative or a cup of tea with a neighbour or dropping something off at someone's house just to see how they are, um, that sort of thing. So that's called five for a friend. Um, and then this then the the challenges ramp up. So after number five, we move on to a few 50s, but then we've got a hundred uh days, which is um the hundred days of climate play challenge. Um, and that's all about just accepting that nobody can get everything right when you're trying to fight climate change, and just trying to um establish a small new habit, anything you can do at all, and and try and establish it for 100 days because it takes obviously time to um put a new habit into your life, and so they're just saying stick with something for a hundred days and try and make one thing, make one change um that's a positive thing to do for the environment. And then the final one in this article is a six-month challenge, um, and that is about washing your jeans. So the challenge, let me see, yeah. The challenge is called it's run by a denim company based in Wales that actually makes uh jeans in Wales. It's called the No Wash Club, and they are challenging people to not wash their jeans for six months um to try and save uh on water and energy consumption and microplastic shedding through your washing machine. So you can join the no wash club and see if you can not wash your jeans for six months. I have to tell you now, I would not be able to do that. I think that is um the amount of times I wear my jeans, which is nearly every day, I just would not be able to do this challenge. But I'm sure there are some people who might be okay with it. So those are just some examples of um things in the article. Um, and the reason why I'm sharing this, my podcast, is because it really caught my attention when I was flicking through my magazine, and I thought um it could be a very useful marketing tool for PTA. I could I thought it could be really effective for asking parents to join in or donate to your PTA. So if you're wanting to send something out to parents, it's the start of a new term. Maybe you're ramping up for your Easter fundraising or your summer fundraising, and you need to get some um advertising out there or a poster or a flyer out to your parents, then I thought this could be a really creative way of asking the same questions that we are always asking. For example, can you volunteer? We need helpers, we need volunteers, can you donate a cake? Can you donate an Easter egg? Can you donate a prize to our auction? That sort of thing. We're always asking the same questions. And I think that presenting the same questions but in a different way, I think will yield better results. I have lots of optimism for this for you. Um, so I'm hoping you might give it a try. So I had a little go at putting together a list of numbers and ideas that could act as a starting point if you wanted to have a go with this idea. So this is these are my suggestions, and I'm sure that you can come up with something a lot better than this. But again, what we're focusing on is uh encouraging people to make small changes so that they feel it's achievable and that they can fit it in. So if you wanted to start with number one, then you could ask people to say donate one cake to our regular cake sales. One cake in the whole year is all you need to do. Or you could buy or donate one school jumper to our secondhand sale if you have a lot of those. Or two, you could say buy two pieces of cake at our cake sales, one for now and one for later. Again, for number two, you could suggest bring a friend to volunteer on a stall or bring a friend to this quiz night um that we've organized. Or number three, bring three friends to the quiz night and make a team. Um number five, suggest to people they buy five raffle tickets in our raffle. Um what else did I have? Uh 10, 10 times 10 I've written down here, uh, which is if people do not if you know some parents might be um happy with just donating some money per month, so you could try and encourage that possibly if you felt comfortable with that. Which uh so 10 but 10 times 10 would be 10 months of donating 10 pounds a month, so you would get £100, you would donate £100 to the PTA at the end of that time. Um, and then I did have a number uh one for the number 100, which is obviously join our 100 club to win a prize every however many weeks you draw your 100 club, or if it's a 50 club, you can put 50 there. Um so I think I'm sure you can come up with some better and more inspiring suggestions than those. Obviously, those are kind of just borg standard suggestions, but um what you really need to do is go through your planned events and your opportunities for volunteering to pick out some things which would work for you and your school community. I think it would be quite easy to adapt it, really. Um and then what's important um is how they have laid this article out. So they have taken each number and put it in a box and made it massive and given it special colours so that in the article it's the numbers that jump out at you rather than the text, and your eye is drawn to the number rather than the text next to it. Um, the text next to the number obviously explains what the number specifically refers to, so then you can get more details. But I just found the whole thing more eye-catching than reading a standard letter. Um, and I also knew from reading the little description at the start of the article that the ideas on it were going to be small achievable ones, although I'm not sure still about the six months um don't wash your jeans one. I don't think surely no parent is gonna be able to do that for six months. Um, although it, you know, it would take washing my jeans off my to-do list, so that could be a bonus. Um I did actually try to use this number idea on an end-of-year report for our school newsletter to show parents what we had achieved that year a couple of years ago. And again, I just I think I just wanted to present some of my information in a different, more interesting way. I didn't lay my report out like this article, so it wasn't as visual, but I did um highlight some of the things that we had achieved. So let me just find um what I put in my article. So in the article, uh, it was my end-of-year report, and I wanted to I I kind of put the figures in. Well, I just put a figure for the whole year in, um, but I wanted to show or try and show exactly how much work that had been. Um and so this is what I wrote. Um I basically said we estimate that we've raised over £4,500 for the school this year, and here are some stats for you. So I put £1,000 tickets sold in our big summer raffle, 300 school rules broken during Break the Rules Day, £174 Tombola prizes won, £161 school tea towels sold, £68 items of secondhand uniform purchased, 60 elf names guessed to win the squish mallow at the winter fair, 50 raffle prizes sourced and won by the school community, nine contributions to year six levers hoodies. We're a very small school, we only had nine levers. Okay, just to put that into context. This year we have six, it's a lot smaller. Um we had five non-uniform days, two coaches for the whole school trip to a museum, and one beautiful willow-woven hedgehog for the school grounds. And I was so pleased to put all of those things in my report. I felt it really um gave a bit of energy to all the things that I would normally have said we did, just presented it in a different way and quantified it and I think makes it a lot more interesting. Um, I think that presenting information as numbers, because we do deal with numbers a lot in the PTA, don't we? I just think it adds another dimension to your successes and achievements as you can show the scale of what you have done across the school, no matter how big your school is. And I think myself, it's actually really helpful in raising the profile of your PTA in the school community. For each individual, they might buy one or two items of secondhand uniform, but finding out that much more has been sold is really great, isn't it? And seeing how many tombola prizes have been donated as a total figure, rather than just saying this is what we raised on the tombola, it's much more impressive, I think. Um, because I think that it might help people who chose not to donate to take part next time if they can see others donating or helping, and for people who did donate, it helps them to continue to donate if they can see how many tickets are being sold for prizes or how many other people are also contributing. I think it gives it could help to give your school community momentum. And if anybody also sees a number that they think is very low, for example, um if you're I mean, you know, really talking about donations, then it might encourage them to donate next time um to be more helpful. So I think um that presenting your information, the same information but taking it in a slightly different angle could could really help your PTA. So that is my little episode for you today. Um, it's just a little marketing idea for you, a different way to present the same information. Back in episode 24, I did talk about communicating with parents and how I often used many different methods and styles to try and get the message out so that people didn't just tire and just kind of glaze over and not read all the stuff that I was sending out. Um, and this is just basically another idea to add to your portfolio to focus the poster or the email or the social media around numbers, and you never know, it might make one other person pay attention or help to share it or whatever. So if you haven't tried this method, maybe you decide to give it a go. This could be your one thing, one small change that you might make with your next few uh communications out to parents. So, yeah, if you try it, do let me know. And if you get any different results from it, which I'm hoping you would, then do let me know. Um, but that's the end of the episode today. It's just a really short one so that I could get this out before you start to do any uh comms for this term. Um, but yeah, do let me know. My email is hello at ptapodcast.com and I will chat to you next time. Bye for now.