Newsletter builder for PTAs and schools

The idea

The weekly PTA newsletter is assembled by one volunteer who spends Sunday chasing teachers for blurbs, pasting them into an editor, fixing the tone mismatches, and then giving up on translating it for the third of families who don’t read English. Mailchimp at $20/mo shows organizations pay for newsletters, but Mailchimp starts at the design stage — it has no answer for the actual bottleneck, which is collecting and cleaning a dozen ragged submissions.

The wedge is the workflow upstream of the editor: a no-login submission link teachers actually use, AI assembly that turns raw pastes into a coherent issue with a consistent voice, and one-click translation with a hosted multilingual web version. That last feature alone is a board-meeting selling point, because family engagement across languages is something PTAs are formally measured on.

Who pays

The PTA or PTO, which has a real budget and a treasurer happy to approve $10/mo — less than they spend on one bake-sale banner. The champion is the newsletter volunteer, who is desperate. Distribution: PTA and PTO leader Facebook groups, PTO Today forums, and the newsletters themselves — every issue’s hosted page carries a small made-with footer seen by hundreds of parents, many of whom sit on other schools’ boards.

MVP scope

• No-login submission links with section picker
• Claude assembly: sectioning, tone editing, events extraction, subject line
• Side-by-side review editor keeping originals immutable
• 3 email templates with school colors, sent via Resend or exported as HTML
• One-click Spanish translation plus hosted web version with language switcher
• Skip for v1: SMS delivery, event RSVPs, payment/fundraising links, per-classroom sub-newsletters

Build RoomNotes, a newsletter builder for PTAs and school volunteers. Stack: Next.js (App Router) with Postgres, Claude API for assembly and translation, Resend for sending.

Core flow: 1) The volunteer editor creates a newsletter issue and gets a submission link to share with teachers, room parents, and club leads. 2) Submitters open the link (no account needed), pick a section (principal's note, class updates, events, fundraising, kudos), and paste raw text — typos, all-caps, whatever. 3) When the editor clicks Assemble, Claude organizes submissions into sections, rewrites each for consistent friendly tone and length, drafts a subject line, and pulls out dates into an events box at the top. 4) Editor reviews in a side-by-side view (original submission vs edited), tweaks anything inline, and picks from 3 clean email templates with the school's color and logo. 5) One click translates the entire issue into the languages the school has enabled (start with Spanish); recipients get the email in one language with a prominent link to a hosted web version with a language switcher. 6) Send via Resend to an uploaded family email list, or export HTML for districts that require sending from official systems.

Pages: issues dashboard, public submission form, assemble/review editor, template picker, send screen with list upload, hosted issue page. Non-obvious detail: keep original submissions immutable next to edits so teachers trust nothing was lost. Pricing: first issue free, $10/mo per school including translation.