[PTA] How to gently encourage people to run for officer positions

Hello, I'm Iriemon.

Although I had never participated in PTA activities before, I have been serving as the PTA president at a public junior high school in Tokyo since this fiscal year.

I will report on various PTA matters in this note.

Adding a certain type of question to the officer recruitment survey

Although it was a bit slow, I managed to find candidates for next year's officers in February, and we are currently accepting votes for the written general meeting to confirm the candidates until next weekend.

This time, when recruiting candidates for next year's officers, I tried a secret strategy taught to me by a PTA president at a nearby elementary school.

Another president of a nearby elementary school who heard this secret strategy together with me also tried it, and it seems the number of candidates for next year's officers increased.

That secret strategy is to "include casual options in the officer recruitment survey."

In fact, I set the questions and options for this survey as follows.

Question
Please choose the option that best matches your thoughts regarding supporting the activities of the PTA office for the next fiscal year.

Options
1. Any position is fine
2. I will support through "Operations"
3. I will support through "Secretarial"
4. I will support through "Accounting"
5. I will support through "Accounting Audit"
6. I can support something if I am with an acquaintance
7. I will support if there is no one else
8. I cannot commit, but I am interested
9. I will participate in various committees (not as an officer)
10. I am cheering for you!
11. Other

Among these, the casual option is 8.

I included this option for people who think, "It's not that I absolutely cannot be an officer, but I don't necessarily want to do it actively."

As a side note, I included 9 (participate if it's a committee) because I wanted to know how many people would declare, "Being an officer is too heavy, but I would do it if it were a committee," even though it is not related to this officer recruitment.

The results of the secret strategy were wonderful

For this survey, I asked people to choose one from 1 to 11, and 4 people chose the casual option 8.
The results are as follows. The number of responses below partially summarizes the content written in 11 (Other).

• Those who chose responses similar to 1-5 (running for a specific officer position) ... 5 people

• Those who chose 6 (if with someone else) ... 0 people

• Those who chose responses similar to 7 (if no one else is available) ... 3 people

• Those who chose 8 (casual option) ... 4 people

• Those who chose 9 (participate in various committees) ... 2 people

You might think that the number of people who chose options 1 through 9 is small.
In reality, only about half of the members responded to this survey, and over 90% of those who did either chose option 10 (I support you) or are graduating next year.

Since the quota for officers is nine, it is a huge help if even four people step forward as candidates.

After this, when I contacted those who answered 8 individually, surprisingly, three people agreed to become officers for the next fiscal year.

The next fiscal year's officer team will consist of 11 members.

A total of 11 members were finally gathered for next year's officers.

If we receive approval at the written general meeting by next week, the structure will be finalized.

As I wrote in the article below, four current officers (including Iriemon) were originally going to continue as officers next year, so there seems to be no problem with PTA operations with just these members.

However, all four continuing members have children who will be in the new third grade, and I conducted the survey with the hope that parents of new first and second graders would also participate for a smooth handover.

Since 7 out of the 11 members are parents of new first and second graders, thanks to you all, we were able to achieve our goal.

The members who volunteered this time have agreed to take on the officer roles for the next fiscal year with a positive attitude after observing this year's operations.

Moving forward, I would like to continue making the PTA an organization where members who can participate do so, while reducing the compulsion to participate in activities.

Thank you for reading until the end. See you later!