Calendar for parents of specific grades to add community events

Daniel Wallach
Daniel Wallach
Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1
in Blackbaud K–12 Education Solutions™ General Discussions

Hi everyone,

Our school is looking to set up a way for parents of kids in Gr 7 to add events to a shared calendar, as a way for these families to be aware of celebrations they're holding. I'm wondering what people's opinions are on the best way to go about this? My thought is to create a community group with just these parents as members. The group would need to be used from year to year, so membership would have to be updated annually, presumably referencing existing student/parent lists. We've only used Academic groups until now, so this would be a good intro to using Community groups for other things.

Anyone see any issues with this?

Comments

  • Tina Pappas
    Tina Pappas
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Daniel Wallach We use community groups similarly. We have parent groups for each grade level, a PTA group, and a smaller group for just room parents. It's worked well so far.

  • Brian Gray
    Brian Gray Community All-Star
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 5 First Reply bbcon 2025 Attendee Badge

    @Daniel Wallach - If you decide to use community groups for this, you should consider defining the groups in terms of graduating class instead of grade level (Parents of the Class of 2029 instead of Parents of 6th Grade).

    You can use the Smart List feature of the roster to define the members of the group to be those who have the role of parent and have a child with that graduating year.

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    Once you define the group membership that way, you won't have to do anything extra to maintain it. People will gain or lose access to the group based on changes to their student's enrollment. (Like the old TV infomercial…set it and forget it.) You can even make groups for several years ahead, so you don't have to remember to make a new one each year.

    The other advantage of defining membership by graduating class is that each group of parents will stay in the same group from year to year, so they will have access to information from previous years relevant to them, instead of being moved into another group at the start of each year.

  • Daniel Wallach
    Daniel Wallach
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Tina Pappas
    Do you have a way for parents to add events without being made group owners? My understanding is that's required to give them that permission. We're trying to put the onus on parents here, but we wouldn't want them to have unneeded access.

  • Tina Pappas
    Tina Pappas
    Eighth Anniversary Kudos 3 Name Dropper Participant

    @Daniel Wallach If you make them Content Editors you could grant them access to the categories you choose without making them an owner.

  • Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    Tenth Anniversary Kudos 5 Name Dropper Participant

    @Daniel Wallach We have the same challenge. We funnel these events through a coordinator (either the admin assistant to the middle school principal, the Jewish life educator, or rabbi-in-resident) who puts the events on a shared calendar and publishes it through a post in Resources.

  • Daniel Wallach
    Daniel Wallach
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Lauren Marcus Eisenberg
    I like that idea too, unfortunately, the school wants to take it out of admin hands as much as possible, and use it as another way to get parent buy-in to the system.

  • Daniel Wallach
    Daniel Wallach
    Sixth Anniversary Kudos 2 Name Dropper Facilitator 1

    @Tina Pappas
    I had understood (from BB support!) that only group owners could add events. Looks like it works though - thanks!

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