It’s an hour before your youth league game and thunder clouds are rolling in. Weather reports indicate the storm will hit right around game time so the league has decided to postpone it.
Thanks to your CallingPost account, you can record a message and quickly send it out to all the parents of the kids on your team. No more worries about people showing up because you couldn’t contact them. Except…
As you’re packing equipment into your van, ready to head home before the rain hits, you see a car pull up. Then a few more. Two of your players jump out, ready to play. Several more people are heading to the stands. What happened?
It turns out the two players were staying with grandparents while their parents worked. The grandparents weren’t included in the CallingPost group you formed. Some of the people in the stands are relatives who also weren’t in the group.
One Little League group found a solution to that dilemma. They realized that in today’s world both parents often work away from home and depend on others to care for the kids during the day. The parents may receive the message, but not in time to call the caregivers about the change in plan. So they included all of those caregivers and relatives who had an interest in the games, which greatly increased their communication abilities.
While including all these people swelled the groups to several hundred people, and cost a few dollars more for their semi-monthly phone calls, the resulting increase in communication was worth every penny to them.
The same idea can work for church youth groups, 4-H groups or any other student groups where children may be staying somewhere other than their homes during the day, especially during summer months and school breaks. It may take a bit more effort in the beginning to include the extra caregivers, and cost a few cents more, but it’ll produce a big benefit in the long run.