Background:
In spring of 2003, the PTA for the Donald Rheem Elementary school began a paper-work reduction process. The goals of this effort were to:

1. Reduce volunteer labor expended in the following ways

• redundant data entry
• chasing incomplete paper forms
• checking data for accuracy
• processing payments

2. Improve data accuracy through updating one database rather than many

3. Lower copying and postage costs

4. Reduce parental effort

System Requirements:
The PTA selected eteambuilder to allow implementation of an online registration process for all PTA programs. For Rheem School, these programs include after-school enrichment classes, sign-ups for volunteers to support PTA activities, sale of merchandise (e.g. school logo items), and fundraising - including the PTA sponsored Hot Lunch program. In addition, the PTA required a method to capture family information (e.g., names of parents and students, address and contact data, emergency health information, etc.) that was to be shared as appropriate, based on user security, with Program Leaders and the school office in either a printed or electronic format.

Examples of Outstanding Service:
1) The human contact and extreme responsiveness on the part of the eteambuilder group made building our site a more enjoyable task. A group of PTA parents were e-mailing each other at 10:00 pm Pacific time one evening discussing various issues related to the online registration site. We sent an e-mail to eteambuilder, expecting a reply the next morning, as they are on the East coast. Well, we were VERY pleasantly surprised to receive a reply from them within a few minutes. This meant that eteambuilder was working on our website at 1:00 am their time.

2) eteambuilder’s willingness to add features and enhance functionality for our specific needs. One evening we received an e-mail from eteambuilder notifying the Online Registration Implementation Team that they added a feature to allow multiple e-mail addresses per single account. This was done specifically for our group and of his own volition.

3) The database, forms and website pages were designed completely by eteambuilder following our requirements and guidelines. The pages were made to emulate the current Rheem PTA website, to minimize separation between the two sites. Furthermore, eteambuilder provided us with feedback and ideas on how best to capture information and streamline the site. Their insight was invaluable in making the registration process as smooth as possible for our parents.

4) eteambuilder listened to all our requests and ideas without ever making us feel that we were being demanding or unreasonable. They were willing to consider any request and always came up with excellent solutions to the many obstacles we faced. For example, we needed the ability to manipulate registration for existing accounts, when parents registered online for the most part and then submitted additional registration on paper. eteambuilder quickly gave the Rheem PTA master account administrative access to add children/parents to programs, but was cautious enough not to allow us to modify family information (e.g. e-mail addresses, passwords, etc.).