GroupTing Makes It Easy to Organize Volunteers for Group Events

GroupTing is a new service that makes it easy to organize group events. The purpose of GroupTing is to enable you and your event attendees to keep track of who is attending your event and what they are bringing to it. For example, if I'm planning a classroom party and I need parents to contribute cups, beverages, snacks, plates and napkins, when I send out my invitations I can request that people bring one or more of those items. GroupTing allows me to specify how many of each item is needed and who has volunteered to bring the requested items.

Creating an event in GroupTing is quick and easy. To create an event just give it a name, set a location, set a date and time, then fill in the event details including the items that are needed for the event. Once you've created the event you can send email invitations directly from GroupTing. Recipients of your email will be able to click through to RSVP and indicate if they can bring things to the event. GroupTing will send event reminders to people who say that they are planning to attend your event.

You can also use GroupTing just for invitation management and skip the part about asking people to bring things to your event.

Applications for Education
There are other services like GroupTing, VolunteerSpot and Sign Up Genius come to mind, but GroupTing is probably the easiest to use. As mentioned above, it could be a great tool for organizing classroom holiday parties, PTA fundraiser events, or any other school event that relies on volunteer contributions.

SimplyCircle Helps You Organize Communication With Parents

Last year I featured a school-to-parent communication service called SchoolCircle. Over the summer SchoolCircle changed its name to SimplyCircle and added some helpful new features.

At its core SimplyCircle is a free service that is designed to help elementary school teachers organize communication to the parents of their students. SimplyCircle offers many of the features of Google+ Communities without the need for parents to join Google+.

Through SimplyCircle you can create an online community for parents of students in your classroom. You can use SimplyCircle to send messages, organize tasks for parent-volunteers, and post updates about things happening in your classroom and in your school. Parents don't have to sign into SimplyCircle daily because you can choose to send a daily digest of updates to their email addresses.

Just in time for the new school year SimplyCircle added some new features included an integrated calendar that teachers can use to plan and organize events for multiple groups in one place. SimplyCircle added a one-click volunteer sign-up function. The volunteer function includes the option to send reminders and details about volunteer responsibilities. And you can now send individual messages to parents instead of just group messages.

Learn more about SimplyCircle in the video embedded below.