Three Lessons From LAUNCH 2025 We Took to Heart

Last weekend, our team attended LAUNCH 2025: the Texas PTA’s annual leadership conference in Dallas. More than 2,000 PTA leaders, volunteers, and advocates came together to share ideas, attend workshops, and work towards a collective vision of schools supporting communities.

But a lot of what we learned happened outside of the sessions. It happened in hallways and at vendor tables, where parents and educators told us about the daily challenges they face.

Those conversations confirm what we’ve known for a long time: high fees, overworked volunteers, and declining memberships are huge problems for PTAs, in Texas and beyond.

So here’s what we learned at LAUNCH 2025, and how we’re responding to those concerns.

1. High fees are hitting the schools that need the most help

One of the most sobering conversations we had, again and again, was about money. Not just raising it, but keeping it.

In particular, PTA members from Title I schools told us how hard they work to run fundraisers, only to watch a painful portion of their proceeds vanish into fees.

Working with third party companies to organize events like fun runs can often seem like an easy way to raise large amounts of money for underfunded schools. But when those same companies turn around and take 50% or more of the total earnings, it comes at the cost of student opportunities.

What’s worse is that these costs aren’t always clear upfront. School groups who were counting on these events to support much needed initiatives can find themselves blindsided by fine print, service fees, or required add-ons.

Learn More: Your school fun run: DIY or working with professionals?

Takeaways:

• Private fundraising companies can sometimes help underfunded schools raise large amounts, but they often take 50% or more of the proceeds.
• These costs aren’t always clear up front, which puts schools at risk of coming up short when their students are in need.

2. Volunteers don’t need more tools; they need tools that do more

We talked to people running silent auctions on one site, collecting dues on another, managing spreadsheets in Google Drive, and texting updates to parents from their personal phones.

This mirrors something we’ve known about school fundraising for a long time: it’s not a lack of effort that holds PTAs back. It’s fragmentation.

When a PTA’s work is scattered across different platforms, apps, and locations, it takes more work to confirm details and manage tasks. This unnecessary administrative burden can quickly nickel-and-dime volunteers into a state of burnout (a word we heard used more than once by frazzled parents, teachers, and officers).

We met volunteers whose Google Drives had run out of storage due to endless spreadsheets and documents.

We met treasurers who were terrified of making a mistake because manually correcting it would take hours of hunting through poorly organized archives.

We met parents who loved their schools, but dreaded their next volunteer project because they worried it would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Their message was consistent:

“We need one place to run our PTA, and we need it to work.”

Learn more: Essential resources and tools for PTA volunteers

Takeaways:

• Volunteers are already stretched thin, and unnecessary admin tasks make their roles even harder.
• Many volunteers express a strong preference for platforms that fulfill multiple functions and eliminate the need to hop between tasks or apps.

3. Membership declines when parent engagement suffers

A lot of PTA leaders we spoke to were worried about shrinking membership numbers. But while it’s true that PTA membership across the country has been steadily declining for years, there is a clear reason why: many school groups aren’t reaching parents effectively.

New parents want to support their children’s schools. But they also want clear and specific information on how to do it. They want to know what joining means, what they’ll get, and how it helps.

It wasn’t all doom and gloom on this front. We saw a lot of excitement around strategies that met families where they are—especially when it came to digital platforms that removed common obstacles to participation. Some of the most promising conversations we had were about:

• Making it easy for parents to join by selling memberships online instead of relying on in-person transactions that involve commuting and manually archiving documents.
• Incentivizing new members by offering discounts on online store purchases and special perks for different membership tiers.
• Solving language barriers for international parent volunteers via AI translations.
• Having dedicated online directories for parents and volunteers to help them stay connected and in the loop about how their work is improving student experiences.

As the needs of modern school groups evolve, their workflows and processes have to evolve as well. That means more PTAs are turning to digital platforms that remove common challenges for members.

Learn more: How to attract new PTA volunteers this year

Looking for solutions to the problems modern PTAs face

We didn’t go to LAUNCH 2025 to pitch our platform. We went to better understand the people we serve, like the treasurers struggling to stretch budgets or the moms running events from the carpool lanes.

When we came home, we had a clearer picture of what’s still broken in our nation’s schools. But we also had a stronger sense of what’s possible.

Our work at FutureFund is about rebuilding trust in the idea that volunteering for your school can be joyful, meaningful, and effective. To that end, we continue to focus our efforts on helping schools raise more money, give hours back to volunteers, and make parents feel excited about supporting their children’s school communities.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

Thank you to every PTA leader who gave us your time, your honesty, and your trust. We’re building something better with you, and for future generations.

– Darian, Amy, & The FutureFund Team

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