Decide who will be included in your phone tree and gather their contact information. Your list may include all home-school families in your area, a select group of home-schoolers who are using similar curricula, home-schoolers associated with a particular church or organization and other options. Include all those you want to be involved in the phone tree communication system.
Decide who will be at the top of the phone tree. This person will be the contact point for anyone wanting to use the phone tree to share information and will be the first person to make calls. You may also designate an alternate for the lead person should he be unreachable.
Decide how many levels your phone tree will need. For example, imagine you have a group of 24 home-school families you want to include on your tree. You want each person to have to make no more than three calls. To begin, the top person calls three people. These three people make up the second level. The second-level people make three calls each, contacting nine people. These nine people make up the third level. Between levels one, two and three you have now reached 13 people. If seven of the nine people on level three were to contact one person and two were to contact two people, you would have reached all 24 families in four steps. How many steps and calls you will need depends on the size of your group.
Draw the phone tree. Participants will appreciate a visual copy of the phone tree so they will be able to see where they fit in and who they are responsible for contacting. Word processing programs often have drawing tools to make neat boxes and lines, or assign the task of designing a visual copy of the phone tree to a student as a project.
Distribute the phone tree and practice using it. The top person on the phone tree should initiate a test message and call everyone on the second level. Each person on the third level and below should be told to call the top person when he or she gets the message. Note any places on the tree where messages are not getting through and modify your chart, if necessary. For instance, if someone is often away and does not get messages soon enough, consider moving him down to a lower level. That way, messages do not get held up.