Apologies for reviving an old topic, but I’ve actually created an account just to reply to your message! We’ve been having a number of issues with parents not being aware of activities (especially parents of our youngest cadets) and we were discussing the creation of a website that sounds very much like the one you have. I would love to see more of the site if I can and see how you’ve created it, etc.
I work in a school and one of the single biggest problems is getting info to parents, schoolkids forget to tell parents, which given the cadets are schoolkids is to be expected.
The school has a website and twitter feed, but the most effective way is letters home either as bits of paper and or via email. A few parents operate a FB page, but it seems that is more for moaning about the school than anything useful. Letters are put on the ‘letters home’ section of the website but does rely on people looking at it.
We now email parents at the squadron as well as give cadets bits of paper and it seems to work well. We have a non-Bader squadron email that we use for this as it means all staff can use it rather than it coming down to one or two people to do everything and there aren’t the issues of access that can happen with Bader accounts. I’ve never been able to access Bader at work.
This is a really good idea. Having a generic email like “noreply@123sqn.co.uk” and making sure your final message says, call in to the Sqn/ring if you have any questions - or email the person responsible for the event/actvitiy" is going to hit a much higher percentage of people than twitter/FB/MySpace/othersocialmedia