Succession Planning for PTOs: How to Pass the Baton Smoothly

By Renee Zau, Co-founder of DonationMatch

Each year, Parent Teacher Organizations (PTOs and similar groups, such as PTAs, PTSAs, HSAs, Boosters, Friends of, Clubs, Sororities, Fraternities, & Education Foundations) see new volunteers step up to lead. While this infusion of energy is exciting, it can also mean that valuable knowledge and access to critical tools and resources are at risk of being lost if there's no proper succession plan in place.

Too often, each year, we at DonationMatch encounter volunteers creating new accounts for an organization because the previous account wasn't handed off correctly. This results in unnecessary extra work and delays—particularly when it's difficult to verify new volunteers.

Succession planning, both online and offline, is essential for maintaining continuity, ensuring that communication, finances, and programming run smoothly during leadership transitions. It promotes efficiency by equipping new leaders with the tools and knowledge they need to be effective from day one. Additionally, it enhances security by safeguarding access to critical systems and protecting sensitive information.

To ensure your PTO continues running smoothly year after year, it’s essential to have a comprehensive plan for passing down information and access to digital and financial assets. Here are some simple tips and a handy checklist of what to pass on to the next team.

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What to include in a PTO Succession Plan:

✅ 1. Organizational Knowledge

• Bylaws and meeting minutes

• Year-at-a-glance calendar of events

• Volunteer and committee structure

• Annual reports or summaries

• Notes or tips from outgoing officers, including any unofficial duties or helpful habits

• Receipts or lists of key assets and equipment in storage

• Event vendor lists and lessons learned from past events

✅ 2. Financial Records

• Annual budgets and financial reports

• Bank account access info (or instructions for authorized access change)

• Tax ID number and nonprofit status documentation, including the next due dates of annual filings

• State registration information, including the next due dates of state filings and payments

• Previous year’s fundraising totals and expenses

• Payment processor login (e.g., PayPal, Square, Stripe)

• Receipts, invoices, and reimbursement forms

• Contact info for accountants or bookkeepers

✅ 3. Digital Accounts & Logins

Create a shared and secure master document or password manager (like LastPass, 1Password, or Google Password Manager) that includes:

• Website admin login and hosting provider credentials

• PTO email account(s) and recovery options

• Social media logins (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.)

• Fundraising platforms (e.g., MemberHub, Cheddar Up)

• Payment processing platforms (PayPal, Stripe, etc.)

• School key employee directory or contact management tools

• Google Drive/OneDrive login and key document links

✅ 4. Communication Channels

• Access to email marketing tools (e.g., Mailchimp, Constant Contact)

• Contact lists for families, volunteers, and staff

• Access to asset creation tools (e.g., Canva)

• Templates for newsletters, flyers, and event invitations

• Key email threads and communication history with school admins

✅ 5. Partner & Sponsor Information

• List of past and current sponsors/donors

• Contact info and notes on relationships (who to contact, when, and how)

• Past donation request letters and thank-you templates

• In-kind donation details and restrictions

• DonationMatch, Benevity, and other corporate giving platform logins

✅ 6. Software & Tools

Make sure new leaders have access to:

• PTO management software (e.g., MemberHub, PTOffice, Konstella)

• Event registration/ticketing software (Eventbrite, SignupGenius)

• Fundraising platforms and tools

• Survey tools (Google Forms, SurveyMonkey)

• Document storage/sharing tools (Google Drive, Dropbox)

✅ 7. Legal & Compliance

• Insurance policy documents and renewal dates

• State nonprofit registration documents (e.g. Articles of Incorporation, Secretary of State, State Attorney General’s Office, Franchise Tax Board, etc.)

• IRS Letter of Determination, filings, and tax return copies (Form 990)

• Background check policy and vendor details, if applicable

✅ 8. ORGANIZATION-SPECIFIC DETAILS TO PASS DOWN

Every PTO is unique, and some of the most valuable knowledge isn't written down—it's passed on. Be sure to include the following often-overlooked details to help the next team avoid starting from scratch:

• Event schedules, timelines, and planning checklists specific to your school’s traditions

• Preferred vendors and suppliers, including where to buy materials, school merchandise, or food—plus any known discounts or tax-exempt processes

• Expert or pro bono volunteers in your community (e.g., graphic designers, photographers, accountants) who’ve supported the PTO in the past

• Facility usage info, like how to reserve the gym, cafeteria, or parking lot for events

• Contacts and relationships with school staff, custodians, and local businesses that support events or donate regularly

• Tech quirks and workarounds for commonly used platforms or school-specific systems

• Storage locations, keys, and access info for physical supplies, decorations, or inventory used year-to-year

• Annual event feedback or notes to capture what worked and what didn’t

Capturing and sharing these insider tips can save the new team hours of guesswork and keep your PTO running smoothly.

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for a Smooth Transition,

• Schedule an overlap period or transition meeting between outgoing and incoming officers.

• Conduct a walkthrough of each system or tool being transferred.

• Set up role-based email addresses (e.g., president@ourPTO.org) that can be easily forwarded or reassigned to new officers each year.

• Update PTO contact information and addresses on all accounts.

• Host a shared-drive cleanup and organization session.

• Encourage outgoing leaders to write "how-to" guides for their roles.

• Store all documentation in one centralized, easily accessible place.

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Succession planning may not be the most glamorous part of volunteering, but it’s one of the most important. Taking the time to organize your organization’s knowledge and tools ensures that next year’s volunteers—and the students and school you serve—are set up for success.

By using this checklist and making intentional plans, you can build a lasting legacy of strong leadership and effective support.

Don’t forget to share this list with your board and team!

How to Involve Stakeholders in Strategic Planning: A Guide

Guest post by Averill Solutions

Sustaining your nonprofit and furthering its mission is a communal effort. Plenty of people are involved in your nonprofit’s day-to-day activities, from staff members to beneficiaries to your top supporters. Because so many stakeholders matter to your organization, it’s crucial to include their voices in your strategic planning process.

Strategic planning is creating a detailed plan for your nonprofit’s future, which includes specific goals and steps you’ll take to further your mission in the next few years. It’s a highly beneficial process that will give your organization direction and align everyone on its top priorities.

Without the input of key stakeholders, however, you risk choosing unrealistic goals or missing impactful opportunities for growth. In this short guide, we’ll discuss exactly how to involve your most important stakeholders in strategic planning and several ways they can help.

1. Determine which stakeholders need to be involved in strategic planning.

First, think about who plays a major role in your organization and which groups should be involved in its strategic planning. Aside from leadership, who has valuable input into your nonprofit’s operations, program delivery, and development? Which groups are pivotal to successfully carrying out your mission?

According to Averill Solutions, your nonprofit should include the following key stakeholders in strategic planning:

• Board members: Your board of directors makes all your nonprofit’s major decisions and has unique insight into your budget and long-term goals, making board members’ perspectives essential to strategic planning.

• Staff members: Nonprofit staff teams are familiar with different aspects of your organization’s day-to-day operations, meaning they can offer details about how certain activities and initiatives are going and which might need more attention.

• Major givers: Those who give major gifts to your nonprofit have a unique stake in your organization’s success since they provide much of your funding. Make sure you honor their opinions about your nonprofit’s future and assure them that their voices are heard.

• Key community partners: Influential members of the community who interact with your nonprofit can offer broader perspectives on how your work impacts the community. These might include politicians, business owners, and other local leaders.

• Your fundraising consultant: If your organization works with a professional consultant, it’s crucial to involve them in your strategic planning process from the beginning. They’ll bring years of industry expertise to the table and advice.

Depending on your needs and goals, you may also include stakeholders like your beneficiaries, corporate partners, sponsors, and long-time volunteers. Make determinations based on each group’s influence in your organization and the value of their diverse perspectives. For example, you might include an influential business leader along with a few beneficiaries your nonprofit has served for years.

2. Choose representatives from each group.

While it might be nice if every single one of your important stakeholders could be involved in strategic planning, it’s just not feasible. Instead, select a few people from each stakeholder segment to be present during in-depth planning discussions and represent the opinions of their groups.

Use your nonprofit’s CRM or supporter database to find prospects for your strategic planning team. Invite these individuals to be personally and actively involved in the strategic planning from start to finish. In your invitation, explain why you’re asking them to provide their opinion, why their voice is valuable, and what their role in the planning process would be.

Be sure to invite people with diverse perspectives to ensure your strategic planning team is truly representative of your stakeholder groups. For example, a staff member from your development team might provide input into your organization’s technology needs, while a leader in your local community can provide an outsider’s perspective and give suggestions for how your nonprofit can increase its community impact and reputation. Any groups that will be directly affected by your mission should be represented.

3. Provide additional engagement activities for stakeholders.

Other individual stakeholders who don’t have the time to be as intimately involved in the strategic planning process can (and should!) give their input as well—but in easier ways. 

To encourage feedback, provide these individuals with several engagement optionsto participate in their own time. This way, anyone from your core groups of stakeholders can make their voices heard and feel involved in the process, potentially inspiring them to take a more active role in furthering your nonprofit’s long-term goals.

Plan several engagement opportunities that any stakeholder can participate in, such as:

• Open-ended surveys 

• Individual interviews

• Focus groups

In these surveys and discussions, ask stakeholders to chime in about your organization’s strengths, challenges, opportunities, and vulnerabilities. For instance, you might include a question like “How can we improve our fundraising activities to better engage our supporters and community partners?”

4. Incorporate stakeholder input into your strategic plan.

Once you’ve gathered plenty of stakeholder input, it’s time to take it into consideration and implement the suggestions that align with your mission and goals.

For example, say that several board members and a few highly involved major givers shared that they think your organization needs to build up its annual fundraising efforts to provide more sustainable funding. Based on this input, you might set a goal in your strategic plan to grow your annual fund by 15% in the next three years.

Or, maybe your staff members indicated that they could better support your nonprofit’s development and mission if they felt more engaged at work. In this case, you might explore resources like eCardWidget’s employee engagement guide to source ideas for boosting staff engagement and reducing burnout. After evaluating options, choose the ones that seem most impactful and include them as action steps in your strategic plan.

No matter what, be sure to keep your stakeholders in the loop. Let individual stakeholders know when you implement their ideas, and send periodic updates to all the stakeholders involved in the process on how strategic planning is going.

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Involving stakeholders in strategic planning can feel overwhelming or even unnecessary, but rest assured that the efforts you take to solicit stakeholders’ input will pay off in the long run. By getting well-rounded opinions that represent the entirety of your organization’s sphere of influence, you’ll end up with a more informed, actionable strategic plan that can help your organization achieve its goals and desired impact.

The preceding post was provided by a guest author unaffiliated with DonationMatch. The views expressed within do not directly reflect the thoughts or opinions of DonationMatch.

5 Tips For Creating Websites for School-Associated Orgs

Guest post by Murad Bushnaq, Founder and CEO of Morweb

Your website is the face of your school-associated organization, significantly enhancing your ability to connect with potential supporters and engage your audience. Building an effective website can be time-consuming, including researching design tips and gathering analytic information, especially without web design expertise. 

With years of working alongside hundreds of nonprofits, associations, and educational groups, Morweb has built websites for colleges, high schools, and other school-associated organizations. To help you get started building your new website, we’ve put together five key tips specifically for educational organizations.

Your organization should be able to implement each of these tips into your website with a bit of work and research. However, if you find yourself in need of additional advice or help, don’t hesitate to reach out to a professional web design agency that can answer all of your organization’s specific questions about your website. 

1. Find an affordable, intuitive website builder. 

Some website builders are more effective than others for different professional sectors. For example, nonprofits may use a website builder to build donation pages and establish trust with their donors, while schools need a solution that can enhance their educational effort and build smooth communication with all stakeholders including their supporters, parents and students.

While each organization will have its own priorities for what it's website needs to accomplish, here are a few key features to look out for when assessing different school website builders:

• Multimedia support. For many school-related organizations, sharing resources such as educational and how-to videos is a necessity. Assess potential website builders on how well they support these features and how they accommodate the slow loading times that multiple images and videos can cause. For instance, some website builders will automatically compress images, which decreases the file sizes and speeds up page load time.

• Customizable layouts. Your website builder should give your team options. If your team lacks experience designing websites, check out website builders that come with multiple school-specific templates and prioritize ease of use for front-end designers. 

• Mobile optimization. If you’re running a parent-teacher association, your members already have full-time jobs and will likely need to use your website while on the go. Many website builders have mobile options, but be on the lookout for one with automatic mobile optimization that prioritizes usability and fast loading times. 

Additionally, be sure to assess potential website builders’ security. Some platforms perform regular security updates for all websites they support, while others leave it up to individual organizations to protect themselves. If your team is less experienced with cybersecurity or would prefer to limit the number of responsibilities your team takes on, make sure to find a website builder that takes care of security issues for you. 

2. Make your mission clear. 

If you accept donations, recruit volunteers, or encourage website visitors to participate in your organization in any way, you’ll need to make sure your mission is straightforward and easy to find. Remember that your mission isn’t just a summary of your organization, but an external-facing document that new web visitors will want to see. 

A clear mission statement is especially important for fundraisers and donation drives as supporters will want to know how their contributions are making a difference. You can ensure that supporters will find and understand your mission on their first visit to your website by:

• Creating a clear navigation system. Your website will have a few core pages that the majority of visitors will navigate to at some point while browsing your website. For many organizations, these will include donation, services, and about pages. While getting creative with website design can create a new and positive experience for visitors, it’s best not to experiment with your navigation and ensure users will find your mission exactly where they expect to. 

• Branding all additional websites and other online marketing materials. Your website hosts your mission, but all additional websites and platforms (including microsites and social media) should also be branded to your organization and offer a brief explanation of your mission. There are numerous fundraising ideas for schools that your organization can host, and all of them benefit from presenting your mission as clearly as possible. 

• Using images and videos to demonstrate your mission. A plain text description of what your organization is and what your goals are is necessary, but sometimes, videos and images can help supporters visualize your services and role in education more clearly. For example, if your organization helps schools manage after school programs, you might feature photos from past programs you organized. 

Your mission will also be conveyed through other elements on your website outside of your mission statement. For example, the first piece of text on your website will form many visitors’ first impressions of your website, so carefully consider your homepage’s title, subtitle, and descriptive text. 

3. Ensure your website is accessible. 

The best organizations’ websites reach the widest possible audience by implementing accessibility features. Accessible websites improve the user experience and allow visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies to engage with your content. You can make your website accessible by including the following features:

• Video captions and scripts. Videos are an effective way to break up text and get your organization’s message across in new ways. However, not every user can watch videos or rely on their audio. Subtitling your videos with closed captions or providing a separate script helps these users interact with your video. Similarly, providing captions and alt text for images can also help visitors understand what your images are displaying and why they’re important. 

• Meaningful text hierarchy. Dividing your content up by headers helps keep topics organized and prevents visitors from getting overwhelmed by big blocks of text. Make sure that your headers follow a sequentially descending order with no skips between them (e.g. heading four appearing before heading three). Otherwise, readers using screen readers may get confused since they typically tab through the different headings to understand what content is grouped together on the page.

• Legible text. Text can be unreadable if it’s too small, lacks sufficient color contrast, or is in a hard-to-read font. Use a legible font for the bulk of your page, and save fancy fonts for titles if you decide to use them. Ensure your site builder allows users to resize text up to 200% and adjust the page to greyscale to improve color contrast. 

When performing website maintenance, make sure to include accessibility checks, especially for new content. Doing so will make sure all of your visitors are able to use your page and help you quickly catch any minor slips that might occur during website updates. 

4. Identify key features to include.

Rather than thinking of your website as a collection of pages with text and graphics, try contextualizing it as a place where users accomplish specific tasks. After all, users don’t visit your website to read text; rather, they read text to learn about your organization. 

The features you choose to include on your website will shape your users’ experiences and how they go about completing their tasks. Exactly what those tasks are will vary depending on your organization. CommunityPass’ after-school software page outlines a few common features school-related organizations’ websites should include:

• Registration forms. School-related associations and any participant-based programs need to manage registrants and members, collect fees, and attract new participants. Your registration forms should be as streamlined as possible to encourage additional signups and include time-saving features such as automatic payment reminders and collection.

• Merchandise store. Whether you’re selling event tickets, merchandise for your school’s sports team, or school supplies, an integrated storefront lets your organization quickly update its catalog of items, adjust prices, and collect payments. 

• News page. Regularly updating your website signals to supporters that your organization is healthy and still operating. Plus, maintaining an active posting schedule looks good to search engines, too. Rather than producing brand new content pages every week, your organization can keep a news page or blog that updates supporters on recent events or provides them with new information about your school or organization.

You can monitor how effective these features are at assisting visitors by monitoring analytics. The analytics tools within your website builder will allow you see which pages users are navigating to and how they’re finding your website in the first place, helping you identify things your website is doing well and places where it can improve. 

For example, you might discover that your email campaigns are the most effective way to reach supporters, but that your registration forms are experiencing a higher rate of page abandonment than you prefer. 

5. Create valuable content for your website. 

To attract and engage your website’s audience, you’ll need to create valuable content that provides the insights and details visitors are looking for. This helps you build credibility and also enhances your organization’s visibility on search engines. 

Morweb's guide to nonprofit website builders recommends populating your website with blog posts, interactive content, and other engaging content. Once you’ve developed high-quality content, you can use tools like Google Ads (or, the Google Ad Grant, if your organization is eligible) to get your website in front of as many eyes as possible. 

The Gist

Building a new website requires dedicated time and research. Establish a website maintenance routine early and invest in a robust website building tool to save your team future headaches. 

With the right website builder and a clear, user-friendly design, your website can leave a positive impression, boosting your organization's credibility and trustworthiness.

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About the Author:

Murad Bushnaq is the Founder and CEO of Morweb, a custom-built website design and CMS solution that empowers nonprofits worldwide to achieve their missions through software, design, and strategy. Since its inception in 2014, Murad has acted as CEO & Creative, helping nonprofits amplify their online impact through engaging web designs, intuitive software, and strategic communication. Backed by expertise in both creative and technical services, Morweb is a trusted partner for nonprofits seeking to maximize their online presence.