Email for your P&C — set it up so it survives the handover

Every P&C has the same email story. The address is sarahs.mum.2019@gmail.com, Sarah's child finished Year 6 three years ago, and nobody can get into the account that the grant body, the council and the uniform supplier all still write to. Here's how to set email up once, properly, so the next committee inherits it instead of starting again.

Why P&C email goes wrong

A P&C is an organisation with a turnover of volunteers roughly every one to two years, and email is the one system nobody ever formally sets up. It just accretes. That produces four failures, and you'll recognise at least two:

• The address is a person. Suppliers, the school, grant bodies and parents all have a personal Gmail on file. When that person leaves, the relationships leave with them.
• The archive walks out the door. The correspondence that explains why the P&C signed a three-year canteen contract is in a private inbox nobody can lawfully or practically access.
• One person holds everything. One login, one phone with the two-factor codes, and no second admin. If they're unreachable — or the handover is acrimonious — you're locked out permanently.
• Nobody knows who answered. Two exec members reply to the same parent with different answers, or neither does because each assumed the other had.

All four are fixed by the same three decisions.

Three decisions to make first

Before you compare providers, settle these at a meeting and minute them. They're governance decisions, not IT ones.

1. Who owns the domain? The association owns it — not the president, not the school, not the parent who "knows computers". This is the single most important line in this guide.
2. Addresses are roles, never people. secretary@, not jenny@. The role outlives the person filling it.
3. Where does the archive live? Decide now whether mail stays in a P&C-controlled mailbox (yes) or is forwarded into personal inboxes (no — see aliases vs mailboxes).

Choosing a provider

There are five realistic options for an Australian P&C, P&F or PTA. They are not equally good, but the cheapest one that you'll actually maintain beats the best one you won't.

Our recommendation: buy your own domain, then apply for Google Workspace for Nonprofits if you're a registered charity. If you're not, or you can't wait, put a cheap paid host on the domain now — you can migrate later without a single contact needing to update their address book.

A note on the domain name itself

• .org.au reads as a non-profit and is the natural fit. Australian namespaces require an Australian presence — an ABN or your incorporation is normally what satisfies it.
• .com.au also works and needs an ABN or ACN.
• .com or .org has no eligibility rules at all and is usually cheapest. Perfectly respectable if the Australian namespaces are a hassle.

Keep it short and guessable from the school's name — parents will type it from memory. riversidepandc.org.au beats riverside-primary-school-parents-citizens.org.au.

Which addresses to create

Resist the urge to create twenty. Every address is something a future committee has to understand and maintain. Start with the front door and the office-bearers, and add function addresses only where a real handover problem exists.

Two things never to do: don't create an address per person (jenny@yourschoolpandc.org.au becomes dead weight the moment Jenny steps down), and don't put a personal address on any public-facing document.

Aliases, mailboxes and groups — the bit that matters

This is the distinction that decides whether your handover works, and almost nobody sets it deliberately. There are three ways an address can exist, and they behave very differently a year from now.

Groups are the underused answer. In Google Workspace a Group with the collaborative-inbox setting turned on gives you a genuine shared queue at no extra cost; Microsoft 365 calls the same idea a shared mailbox and doesn't charge a licence for it. Either way you get an address that multiple people answer, whose history belongs to the association, and whose handover is two clicks in an admin console rather than a password reset and a prayer.

Running a shared inbox

A shared inbox solves "who answered the parent?" — but only if you agree how to use it. Three conventions are enough:

1. Claim before you reply. Whoever picks a message up marks it as theirs (Google's collaborative inbox has an explicit assign; a shared label or folder per person works just as well). Nobody starts drafting a reply somebody else is already writing.
2. Reply as the address, never as yourself. Check this once when you set the account up and again whenever a new person joins — a reply that leaks a personal address quietly undoes the whole exercise.
3. Resolve, don't delete. Archive handled mail rather than binning it. Storage is not your constraint; institutional memory is.

Add a signature that says who you are and, if your P&C is incorporated, your ABN — it makes you look like the organisation you legally are, which matters when you're asking a business for a donation.

The handover playbook

Everything above exists to make this part boring. Do it in the fortnight after the AGM, while the outgoing exec is still answering messages — not in November when you need last year's grant paperwork.

Two admins. Always two.

The most common catastrophic failure isn't losing an inbox, it's losing the administrator account that controls the domain and all the mailboxes. One admin is one bereavement, one falling-out or one lost phone away from a permanent lockout. Nominate two office-bearers as administrators, and make it a standing item that both are current.

The crown jewels, in order

1. The domain registrar account. Registered in the association's name, with a role address as the contact (never a personal one), auto-renew on, and a card that won't expire with the treasurer's term. Losing the domain loses every address at once.
2. The email admin console. Two named administrators.
3. Recovery details. Point account recovery at another role address you control, not at the president's personal mobile.
4. Two-factor codes. The classic trap: 2FA is set up on one person's phone, and it leaves with them. Use per-person admin accounts where you can, and for genuinely shared logins keep the second factor in a shared password vault so it isn't tied to one handset.
5. A shared password vault. Bitwarden, 1Password or similar — several have free or discounted non-profit tiers. An exec vault beats a spreadsheet called passwords.xlsx, and it beats "ask Dave".

The AGM handover checklist

• New office-bearers added to the domain registrar and email admin console
• Outgoing office-bearers' access removed — every account, not just the obvious one
• Any shared passwords rotated (assume a departed member still knows the old one)
• Group and shared-inbox membership updated to match the new committee
• Departing mailboxes suspended or archived, never deleted — deleting one usually destroys the mail inside it
• Recovery email and phone repointed to current office-bearers
• Auto-renew confirmed on the domain, and on any paid mail plan
• Bank, school, auditor, suppliers and grant bodies told the role addresses are unchanged (they should be — that's the point)
• Handover confirmed complete, and minuted at the next meeting

That last line does more work than it looks like. A minuted handover creates a date, a named responsible person and a record an auditor or a future committee can follow.

Privacy, records and what not to keep

A P&C inbox routinely holds parents' contact details, information about children, volunteer records and financial data. That carries real obligations, and a few habits keep you well clear of trouble:

• Keep P&C business out of personal accounts. It's the single biggest reduction in your exposure, and it's free once role addresses exist.
• Never put a parent list in the To or CC field. Exposing 300 families' addresses to each other is a data breach, and it's one mis-click away in every personal email client. Use a proper list tool — or better, a platform where members' addresses aren't visible to the sender at all.
• Don't keep what you don't need. Volunteer forms, working-with-children details and payment information shouldn't live indefinitely in an inbox. Agree a retention rule and follow it.
• Email is not the minute book. This is the important one. A decision reached over email is fragile: it's invisible to members, hard to audit, and gone when the mailbox goes. If it matters, it becomes a motion and it lands in the minutes. The inbox is for correspondence — the minutes are the record.

Emailing all the parents without landing in spam

The moment you send to hundreds of families at once, you've stopped writing email and started running a mailing list — and the rules are different.

• Personal accounts have hard daily send limits and will lock you out mid-newsletter for looking like a spammer.
• Authenticate your domain. If you're sending from your own domain you need SPF, DKIM and DMARC records configured. Your provider's setup guide walks through it; skipping it is why P&C newsletters land in junk. The major inbox providers now formally require authentication and one-click unsubscribe from bulk senders, and they act on complaint rates.
• Make unsubscribing easy and honour it immediately.
• Send the newsletter from hello@, not from a person. Consistency is what teaches inbox providers — and parents — that you're legitimate.

Honestly, though: a general-purpose mail client is a poor tool for reaching a parent body. You end up maintaining an address list by hand, you can't tell who actually received the notice, and the list goes stale the day someone's child changes school. Notices sent from a membership system — where the list is your member register and updates itself — sidestep all three problems, which is one of the things Bilby Bunch does.

The 60-minute setup plan

Put this on an agenda, get a motion passed authorising the spend, and work through it in one sitting.

1. (10 min) Register the domain in the association's name, with hello@ — or the treasurer's role address — as the contact. Turn on auto-renew and privacy protection.
2. (15 min) Set up the mail provider and verify the domain. Create two administrator accounts, held by two different office-bearers.
3. (10 min) Create the addresses — hello@, secretary@, president@, treasurer@. Groups or shared mailboxes for all but the treasurer.
4. (5 min) Turn on two-factor authentication on both admin accounts and store the recovery codes in the shared vault.
5. (10 min) Migrate what matters. Forward or import the correspondence sitting in personal inboxes — contracts, grants, supplier relationships. You will never have a better opportunity than today.
6. (5 min) Update your public presence: school newsletter, Facebook page, flyers, bank records, ACNC and incorporation records, and any grant portals.
7. (5 min) Minute it. Record the domain, the addresses, who the two administrators are, and where the credentials are kept. Add the handover checklist to your AGM agenda template.

Questions we get asked

This guide is general information for Australian school parent bodies, not legal or financial advice. Your state education department, your state P&C body and your own constitution may impose requirements that override anything here.