Transformative Principal

Welcome to Transformative Principal, where I help you stop putting out fires and start leading.

I'm your host, Jethro Jones.

You can follow me on Twitter at Jethro Jones.

Okay.

Welcome to Transformative Principal.

I'm your host, Jethro Jones.

You can find me on all the socials at Jethro Jones.

I am excited today to talk about something that is near and dear to all of our hearts, which is parent teacher groups, sometimes called PTA, sometimes called PTG, sometimes called just a group of parents, and sometimes these group parents can.

Be a headache.

Sometimes they can be a hassle, sometimes they can be the best thing that ever happened to your school.

So I have with me today Ben Downey, who is the founder and creator of Big Nest, and it is a tool for parent teacher groups to be able to manage everything that they do.

And so, uh, Ben, welcome to Transformative Principle.

Great to have you.

Yeah, thanks very much.

Happy to be here.

Yeah.

Uh, so we're gonna chat about this, but first tell me why you started, uh.

Big nest and what the purpose.

Well, before we get there, let me just say, I got an email from my parent-teacher group that I'm a member of for my daughter, and it came from a different email than what it usually comes from, and I was like, wait a minute.

They've gotten organized and they, they have a system in place because this is not just, uh, Shelly's mom@gmail.com.

This is like.

Peppers Act ptg at bigness or community dot big nest.com.

So I was like, okay, something happened here and I went and looked at the website and saw some of the great things you're doing.

So why did you start it?

What's your story with it?

Oh, by accident, like I did not mean to, like my wife volunteered for a fun run like years and years ago, and like things have just snowballed.

So I didn't mean to do any of this, but, you know, uh, I was doing tech for my local parent group.

Uh.

And just managing their website.

They had this WordPress website, which is, you know, kind of an easy thing to set up.

But it's one of those things where if you already know how to do WordPress, you find it really easy.

And if you're an everyday human being, you find it very frustrating.

There's a lot of idiosyncrasies with managing those sites, so unsurprisingly, they put me in charge of that.

and then kind of during the pandemic, things changed a lot, uh, at our local parent group.

A lot of the families that had been sort of powerhouse families, they left their kids aged out.

Some of 'em moved.

We had one family that did a lot of PDG stuff that ended up in Ghana at like, I can't just invite these people out for coffee to ask 'em how they do the optical arts program.

They're like nine time zones away now.

Right.

So just kind of trying to rebuild our parent group after the pandemic me thinking about, well, how can we do it better?

Because with any organization you have to have a combination of long-term strategic thinking and then short-term putting fires out type activities.

And I've noticed that parent groups really.

Fall into the trap of only addressing the fires, which has consequences.

Like you should not be this far of the 20th century.

And you have a paper-driven PTG, where people are signing up for school activities by filling out a form.

'cause then you've gotta read all those forms, right?

And

Yeah.

these hieroglyphics that people think are very clear,

Yes, they're bad handwriting and bad, uh, understanding of time and all that kind of stuff.

right?

And if some parent is gonna donate their time to manage that afterschool program.

You know, you want them in front of the kids.

You don't want 'em in front of paper trying to figure out what, who said what.

So, uh, that's kind of the genesis of Big Nest was like, okay, I'm a good developer.

I can put a lot of the stuff online and make it easy.

And then, uh, after that kind, the fundraising piece fell into place pretty quickly.

Uh, I did some research to figure out like, how do we do fundraising?

Especially during the pandemic.

You really don't want kids walking door to door asking for donations, right.

No, you don't.

That is horrific.

So had to say, okay, well we gotta modernize.

Let's get something a little more organized.

There's a lot of online tools for accepting donations.

You know, you have PayPal, you have, uh, stripe, you have, um, give butter.

There's phy, there's so many opportunities to do, do nonprofit fundraising online.

Um, but they were all kind of terrible.

Like, I think my experience with, uh, the website that our parent group ran just kind of put a, a, a sour taste in my mouth because it's very clear that parent groups are different.

They're just different from the ground up, the way they interact, uh, you know, buying stuff, selling stuff, it's just different.

Like if you buy a t-shirt, fine, jump on Amazon, grab it, you get it right?

But a lot of times if you're buying, let's say a yearbook for your kid.

It's very important to know what kid is getting that yearbook, what class that kid is in, so that, especially with yearbooks, often we deliver them to the classroom, right?

So you kinda have to have information and a lot of the out of the box stuff for selling, selling stuff through nonprofits just was terrible.

So I really wanted to figure out ways to create this little triangle information that has like the, the person paying the money.

And the kid who's getting it and then whatever classroom is actually, uh, in there.

So kind of snowballed into me just writing my own, uh, fundraising platform.

Uh, that's just the idea is you really just need to know those three pieces of information.

That goes a long way because.

Everything out there is kind of, I don't know.

I don't wanna talk smack, but the reality is they're just, they're so focused on getting a bunch of metrics and finding

Yep.

We optimize your nonprofit and, oh, I could care less.

Like I just want money for the fun run.

Right.

And, and here's the other thing, like a nonprofit that is for a school, PTA is much different than a nonprofit that is for just about anything else, right?

And so we are only interested in this very small geographic area of people and making sure that it's easy for them.

To contribute and be part of our PTA in whatever way they choose to be.

Whether that's donating time, donating money, or donating resources and supplies.

We just wanna make it easy for them to be organized and get things done.

Because one of the things that you say all the time is that, um, uh, A PTA is inherently chaotic and it is.

Yeah, I mean, you, you can't kind of get away from it.

A lot of us volunteer not because we just want to, because we have some sort of surplus of time on our hands.

We're doing it for the community, right?

Like know this is good for people.

Uh, and a lot of ways parent groups are these sort of unsung heroes.

We do so much for the communities that we're in.

We have decades of empirical evidence showing that when kids.

Are in environments where they're getting more parental attention when they're getting involved with the parents.

That goes far, right?

Like kids' brains like that nourishes their souls.

They

Mm-hmm.

parents that are involved.

And the best part is, it doesn't have to be specifically parents.

It can be parental figures, role models, other adults in the community.

the whole point of a community is just get people together, right?

And parent groups do that.

What you have, what you see when you can actually do that successfully is that you get kids that have higher self-esteem, they have better grades, they're less likely to engage in high risk behavior like drugs and alcohol.

So parent groups, I think they get a lot of flack, but no one really understands how foundational they are to a healthy community.

They're

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and two things on that.

Number one, um, you, uh, in.

Regardless of what schools may think.

The, the main educator of a child is their parents, so we have to accept that and recognize that.

And too often we as educators think, no, we are the educators and they're just the parents, and that's not the right thing because it doesn't matter how hard you work at a school, you're not going to overcome.

The culture that is there at home.

And that's not a knock on parents.

That is just the reality.

That's how it works.

So, and I don't want the school's culture to overcome my culture at home because I'm intentionally creating that culture at home.

And even if you're not intentionally creating that culture at home, it still is the dominant thing that the kids are really going to learn from.

And so.

Schools need to, uh, partner with parents in what they're trying to do rather than get parents to partner with them in what they're trying to do.

Because really it's the, the school's responsibility to support the parents in educating and raising their children.

And, and that is so important.

And when you have a parent group that is organized and works well together and there's communication between the school and the.

And the parents, there's a lot of power in that.

That is way more than just, let's raise some money

Yeah,

of all those other things that you mentioned, and it's incredibly powerful.

yeah.

And oftentimes it's invisible, but I mean.

Uh, the there you have to really focus on the interplay between what is on legally on paper are two different entities, right?

You have a school that represents a school district and you have this nonprofit entity, but the reality is like they are very much intermeshed.

it is so helpful to have if you, a lot of presidents at parent groups, like they didn't really do, they didn't wanna be president, they really don't, but they see a need, they're gonna fill it 'cause they don't wanna let their community down.

So it is very helpful for them to have a principal that can say, Hey.

I've been here for the last decade.

I know how you guys usually do, I'll help you keep you on track for this kind of stuff.

Right?

And vice versa.

A lot of times there is principal turnover every few years and it is very helpful to have someone who can say, okay, you're the new principal here.

We're gonna help you out to the extent we can.

We, I can tell you we, what are some of the intangible things that this community really values so that you can hit the ground running and make sure that you are making friends the entire way through the school year.

And the thing that's so important about that is that having institutional knowledge.

Is incredibly valuable.

And when you have a actual system in place that is not just some random mom or dad's email that they can't even find anything in it, it goes a long way.

Uh, we, in my schools, we have often used Basecamp as a tool for, uh, organizing and keeping things, keeping track of things.

Not because it is the only tool that works for it, but it's because it's something that we can say that's where everything is and we don't have to go looking
around for it and try to get access to somebody else's, uh, you know, their own personal Gmail account and try to get that doc that they created and shared.

Um, and so the other thing that I would often do is create, uh, an email address for the PTA president that said PTA president.

My school name@gmail.com so that there was at least this thing that they could pass on to somebody else.

So you could keep track of things, because when somebody new comes in, there's often like, well, we have no idea what happened before.

And there's no record keeping and there's no way to know.

And maybe if it, they were organized, they have a 5 0 1 C3 number, but that's not always the case.

And a lot of times it used to be, you know, we just raise money and somebody just collects it and then we just.

Give it to the school and, and really now it's a lot more complex because they are actual 5 0 1 C3 organizations.

Oh yeah.

Which makes it so much more important that you have some method, some system in place.

I mean, yeah, you're just, you're hitting the nail on the head for sure.

There's no doubt about it.

These things, these used to be really easy organizations to run and they're not anymore.

There's a, there are a lot of work and two things that I like what you said is just getting a dedicated email for the parent group because it's so much easier to hand off that account to the next person.

Yeah.

as you are PTG President, you're gonna get emails from different but also from different vendors, different people that wanna talk to you.

People have knowledge about stuff, so you gotta get a, a shared one.

lot of people don't know, but Google will actually give you a free one.

If you are a 5 0 1 C3, like a true nonprofit.

Google will give you a, not just one email, but I think it's up to 10 or a hundred so you can get whatever your school's name is like.

Oh, the Washington ptg.com, and then you can become president@washingtonptg.com and you can have one for your treasurer, one for your secretary.

And the idea is to have some repository so that some of that institutional knowledge isn't just in someone's brain, it's actually in emails somewhere.

so the other thing is you talked about raising money and the tools that are out there are designed for other nonprofits, and this is something that Damon Hargraves and I have talked about on the podcast.

There's a link to that podcast in the show notes about how, how software is designed or not designed.

For schools and school-based entities like Par parent teacher groups.

And so there's really a, a big challenge to the, the technology exists to go sign up for something else and just make it work.

But what you've done is you've made it very easy for schools to, to use the PTG to raise funds in a way that's systematic.

And I think you even have something where they can round up their.

Purchases to, to donate extra money.

Tell me about that and how that works.

Yes.

So the idea is to like, just to kind of respect my own frustrations, it is very common for parent groups to just kind of Frankenstein a bunch of stuff together and make it kind of work.

But then.

always end up paying for that.

It's when you pay with your time.

So I built, uh, something that is just dead easy to use.

So my background is in e-commerce.

So just took a lot of the strategies that have been used in e-commerce for the last 20 years and applied them to.

A fundraiser.

So it's just, I, I know how to remove friction and just remove obstacles and just make it easy.

So, know, some platforms you wanna donate to this kid and you have to say, okay, well you have to have the child's teacher.

And it's like, grandma, grandpa don't know this kid's teacher say they're in Florida, right?

There's no way.

Or I have to have a special URL.

Like, are you kidding me?

Everyone gets their own special URL for 500 kids at a school get out.

It just makes it so much more complicated.

So, you know, for Big Nest it's like.

Enter the amount you wanna donate.

Add a kid's name behind the scenes.

We ma we do all the matching.

So I just, there's a very robust matching engine that figures out, okay, they Jo, they donated to John Smith.

We know that John Smith is in Mrs. Bowman's class, therefore we know how much to attribute to that class in case they're doing, you know, classroom competitions and stuff like that.

So basically we want a lot of the metrics.

We wanna know who's doing well, we wanna make sure that we reward.

in classes that are really, uh, going above and beyond.

But we don't want to put the onus on those donors.

Like the whole idea is if you are even thinking that you might donate, we wanna capture that donation.

Right.

Uh, and then the other part we do that, uh, you mentioned rounding up.

So the idea is that you are process like A PTG is processing payments online and.

You, it's, there are a few free ones, but it's generally dicey.

I wouldn't, I always, I'd rather go with the paying one.

So the idea is that, uh, bigness works with Stripe, which is a, probably one of the biggest payment processors, but I like 'em 'cause they have a phenomenal customer service.

But B, they give a discount for nonprofits.

So donations are already coming in at a discount.

But then when you check out, we encourage donors to add a few extra bucks and.

It can happen one of two ways.

You can just do a flat fee like 2, 4, 6, or you can do a percentage based.

It's really up to the parent teacher organization.

I can tell you what I have found out, which is interesting, that like it kind of doesn't matter if you're doing flat fee or percentage based so far as people always gravitate towards the two extremes.

They will never click the middle button for some reason.

Like it may as well not exist.

Yeah,

and the other thing is percentage

it also, it has to exist because otherwise they'll be like, nevermind.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the other thing I would tell parent groups is like, go for the percentage based.

I personally, my intuition was, was that like adding a specific number, like two bucks.

It would be completely satisfying to people and they wouldn't have to worry about calculating percentages and they'd want to do that.

And was completely erroneous.

People much people give so much more if they're given percentage based stuff.

So, uh, that happens every single time.

So the idea with, um, big Nest and that you can be doing a donation or it could be a parent setting up for physical activity or buying a spirit, wear, whatever it is.

idea is that.

In the grand scheme of things, through the course of that or spirit wear sale, these micro donations add up to enough money to counteract any money you're losing during the, when you have to pay for the processing fees.

So that's golden.

That's, I mean, the idea that like you can run a, a fundraiser that in one sense earned you $10,000, but in another sense actually earned you $1,200, like.

awesome.

That's amazing.

So, um, that's, I, I, I really love that there's a lot of other programs that encourage micro donations, but those donations that just go away, it's like they go

Yeah.

running the show and it's like, no, I like, I'm the one busting my hump at the PTO.

I would like those donations headed off to my school so I can get it towards my kids so that we can do cool stuff this year.

Yeah.

Well, and when you have it connected to something like Stripe, which a lot of people may not even realize that they're using, but a lot of times they have
their information saved in there and they already know the, they already, like, they put in their email address and it sends 'em a code to their phone and then.

Says, here's your saved information, and it makes it really easy to pay for stuff like that kind of stuff.

Anything to remove the friction from, from signing in and you, you gloss past this, uh.

This matching engine that you have, which I think is really amazing because if I understand correctly, if somebody puts in a different name, like they put in Tommy Jones, then it matches to Thomas Jones and can figure out who's who.

And uh, and I'm sure there's a way that if the match is wrong, then it'll do it.

But, um, but like having that kind of stuff where it's easy, you know, I, I may have.

A, like my daughter's name is, is Katya.

She's the only one with a nickname.

Her full name is Eina, but her, her short name is Katya and that's what, what everybody calls her.

And so my parents would not put in Eina, they would put in Katya.

And so being able to have that match and say, okay, it's still working, um, is, is really valuable.

And I think that that's one of the little things that you mentioned that you.

It just briefly blew past, but it was really good for ease of use of reducing the friction for people to actually donate to the fundraisers that that kids are doing.

Right.

No, it is, and it's like, and it just remembers that, hey, this is the, this is an alias of this child, so that, you know, maybe next year it doesn't, it knows, okay, I get this, I know where this belongs.

Right?

So, and the idea is just making it.

Easier for both sides.

People running the fundraiser, don't wanna spend any more time hunching down who gave money.

but yeah, I mean, bigness is packed with a lot of those sort of Easter eggs.

Uh, one of the favorite ones that a lot of people have is, um, when you're going, there's a storefront functionality where a PTO or PTG can sell cakes or clothing or whatever it is.

But the idea is go through, you order your yearbook.

Right before you hit the payment button, this little popup comes up on screen and we just verify that this is a new order.

like that sounds kind of goofy, right?

But the idea is like parents are really, really busy and if your sale lasts for a full month and they bought a yearbook on week one they just got a text reminder saying the yearbook is, CLO sale is closing soon.

They forgot what they did a month ago because like

Yes.

there are like an almost infinite amount of events that have happened between when they ordered that so

Yeah.

and the current situation now, and all they have is a text on their phone saying order a yearbook.

So we just double check, Hey, this is new order for you.

Okay, that's fine.

Let's proceed to payment.

Or you sure you wanna do this?

We already have this order in hand.

If you, if you are doing multiple, great, but if not, don't

Yeah.

Yep.

That, yeah, that is a cool little feature that, uh, that is super helpful.

And, um, what else is nice is that we're always trying to figure out how to raise more money and.

Schools really want this to be simple from our perspective, uh, because we don't want to answer questions about the parent, the parent group's, uh, fundraiser because we really have nothing to do with it.

So we just promote it and it needs to be easy for us to promote.

And, uh, our school did one earlier this year and the principal just sent out, uh, emails and did phone calls and said, it's time for the fundraiser and here's the link everybody.

Go do it.

And, and then they raised a bunch of money, which was, which was great.

And it made it very simple because, um, nobody wants to go take their kids knock on doors.

Uh, nobody wants to do that anyway.

And, uh, and schools want it to just be really easy and know that we can just turn it over and, and that's all it takes.

So, um, for people who are listening, they, they want to share this with their, uh, ptg.

So tell 'em how to get connected with you and sign up for this.

Certainly, yeah.

So, uh, just head to the website, which is big nest.com.

Uh, that's the easiest way you can learn a little bit more about Big Nest, see some example sites, all that kind of fun stuff.

And there's a link to that in the show notes at Transformative principle.org.

So if you're listening, just scroll down.

There's, there's Big Nest right there.

Um, I thank you for taking the time to chat with me because, uh, when I saw this as a parent, I was like, this is great, and.

And we need to get it out there so people can hear about it.

'cause uh, looking around at my own PTG site, I was like, this is way better than anything we've had, uh, in any of the schools I've been in.

A lot of it comes down to visibility.

You

Yeah.

the, the sort of the curse of most parent teacher groups is that the result of the work is often very visible.

Like it's a fundraiser, it's a spaghetti night.

It's, uh, ice cream, social, but the work that goes into making those things happen that is invisible and a lot of families will progress through years
of going at a school without realizing how much work the parent teacher group is really doing to make this possible, which is that's not what you want.

Like I come across a lot of situations where I've got this parent group that is like two or three moms and they are supporting a school that has 400 kids in it, right?

So they're constantly putting out fires and trying to keep this.

Essentially keep the, the, um, boat afloat so we can get to the shore so they can finish out the school year and make sure that they do everything.

They usually do.

But it's so exhausting, right?

You really need something that promotes the visibility of what you're doing.

Like a lot of places say, oh, I don't need a website, we're good.

And it's like you say that, but the people that are doing all the grunt work desperately need other people to know how much, and there's so much just how much these parent teacher groups are doing.

Yeah.

And, and in my specific case, I did not even think about the eighth grade promotion for my middle schooler.

And when I went to the PTG page, I was like, oh, that's something I need to be paying attention to.

And like it just blew my mind.

So.

Alright, very good stuff.

Go check out, uh, big hyen nest.com.

And Ben, thanks so much for being part of Transformative principle today.

It's been a pleasure.

Thanks so much.

Et.