Mass E-Mails are useless, better web sites needed
As a follow-up to Greg's issue with "Too Many Newsletters", and the responses made by Jeremy Smith and Aaron Schaffer, I believe that the use of mass e-mails have outlived their usefulness.
When mass e-mail was first used, it was designed to inform a large number of people about the latest events or announcements that are deemed important for the University community. Today, with the flood of spam, chain joke messages from friends, and after a message from your college department/office, student group, and the occassional alert from Protective Services, we have treated the wonderful idea of mass e-mail as trash. Electronic communication has become impersonal and unwanted. We are more likely to delete such a message or filter it out from our Outlook/Eudora. USG has gone so far as to ban the use of mass e-mail during election campaigns and restricted candidates from sending their campaign message via third-party mailing lists (i.e. student groups).
When an event is coming up, you may get the flyer in your post office mailbox, and see the poster about it on the wall, then the student group that is sponsoring the event sends you the details via the mailing list, and then another student group sends you the same message as a forward from that same group. If it is a major event, your USG rep may send you a reminder or UPB may do the same thing. Next up is your hall council sending a notice about it. Oh wait, then your RHA rep sends you as a forward from another major group. It keeps on continuing until the event is finally over.
For myself, I am getting tired of the text-based mass e-mails themselves. It is boring, really, it truly is. I think we are more interested in how people send us e-mails with essential and effective content. For newsletters being sent via e-mail, they should be designed with HTML coding. Attaching a word or pdf document just takes up more space. People want to see pictures, bold-faced lettering, tables, just like the paper version. You would think that years later, we should be able to produce better e-mail than the occasional plain-text format. If you want to send a message with one announcement to a 1,000 people, step back and think about it. If it is a security alert, then you are justified in sending it. Otherwise, think long before hitting that "send" button.
My other problem is with the groups for not utilizing their web sites as a major portal site. Students frequently went to the UPB, USG, RHA sites in the past to get the latest info because it was updated on a periodic basis. Why send the newsletter through e-mail or post when you can post a PDF version of it on the site? At least UPB changes their info on a weekly basis because of their event schedule. The Observer is primarily a print publication and they are working on re-designing their site, but their emphasis should be equally concentrated in both print and web publication. If the Observer had a kick-ass site, then students would flock to their web page every Friday because that's when the new issue comes out. If the USG post their agendas and minutes after each meeting and update their list of new campus issues, students would visit their site more often. Or how about we put some sort of interactive component on that site? How about "Ask the President" column or a weekly opinion piece by a fellow representative? Or perhaps a web extra edition on the Observer that you cannot find on the paper version?
If these groups and depts want to get the word out, they should learn to showcase their events and issues on their respective sites, then we could just deal with that mass e-mail message about next year's tuition rate going up another 10 percent.
Comments
Posted by: Brian Gray
Posted on: November 17, 2005 07:09 PM
Maybe these posts by various people will push some ideas.On the idea that emails should by html in nature with photos, colors, etc. there are people that use mail programs that revolt at this format. Some email programs may even block html formatted materials for security reasons. And all these programs and browsers cannot agree with a single format of code.I agree some websites are not inviting and do not promote events well. I still think, especially since new employees and students are always arriving at Case, that you will see mass emails. Maybe the emails will be more directed at "come see our site".
Posted by: Aaron Shaffer
Posted on: November 17, 2005 08:15 PM
I agree with James on properly formatting emails (not plain text).
I disagree with Brian on how well HTML is supported.
Basic HTML tags like bold and italics are supported in email clients, both web based and client based. Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird, Gmail, Yhaoo, AOL... they've all supported HTML email for years. Why are the mass emails still in plain text? Imagine if every website we visited chose to use plain text to ensure viewability on every browser. Who would want to visit?
Some sort of markup would go a long way towards making mass emails more legible.
Posted by: Brian Gray
Posted on: November 17, 2005 08:34 PM
HTML might not be a problem here at Case (other than I do not know of the affiliated organizations CIA, hospitals, etc.) but outside Case it could be a problem. My last employer's email system had great restrictions put on knocking down html formatted messages.
Posted by: Gregory Szorc
Posted on: November 17, 2005 09:07 PM
We we created the software to create the USG Newsletter (which is an HTML newsletter that goes out every other week and can have events submitted by the community at http://usg.case.edu/newsletter/), we made sure to test the HTML with every client we could find. We send the e-mail in both plain text and HTML. It looks perfect in every major e-mail application. The only problem is some clients won't display the header graphic. So, we have an alt tag on the <img> that says "Case Logo" and the client displays a button to show blocked images.
What the university needs is something like our software to aggregate all these announcements into something concise. Anybody can submit event information. Certain users have privileges to create blurbs in the e-mail. When the e-mail is ready to go out, the VP of Communications looks at everything and decides what goes in the newsletter. When he or she is done proofing everything, the newsletter is locked and is sent to the USG president for final approval before it is e-mailed to the masses.
Posted by: Brian Gray
Posted on: November 17, 2005 09:45 PM
Gregory, I like your suggestion. But, what are your thoughts on how often? And if you suggest every few days or weekly what about the groups that like to send a reminder out that day of an event?I prefer to just delete an email based solely on the subject line, rather than reading an entire newsletter of various snippets. That must be why I have fallen in love with RSS.
Posted by: James Chang
Posted on: November 18, 2005 06:55 AM
Obviously, a mass e-mail being sent out to the general student body must include an option to "opt-out" of the mailing list. This guarantees that a student has the sole decision of choosing whether to continue to receive such an e-mail from that list.
HTML e-mails are being used "in a sense." I understand that those that use linux/unix-based e-mails would have problems viewing them, but we're talking about 80% of the receipients using a web-based or Windows mail application that handles HTML messages pretty well.
Groups should learn to enhance their web sites as a two-prong attack on informing the student. This way, it encourages students to visit said sites and would result in sending less reminders about events and any upcoming announcements.
As for the weekly USG newsletter, where's its PDF or Word version on the web site? It would be nice to see an archive of this off their web site. I would assume that if you ask a student how often do you visit the USG web site, the answer would be "only to submit a recognition and/or funding form."
Posted by: cool
Posted on: January 23, 2006 09:11 PM
I think one of the biggest issues that communicators face is when to use "push" and when to use "pull" technology. If announcing a new event, then an e-mail (or now, a paragraph in Case Daily which is trying to aggregate all these messages) is the most efficient (and cost-effective) way of maximizing the distribution of this news. This should be backed up by a website with additional details(and sidewalk chalk, ads, press releases, posters etc. as necessary), but we must still rely on the "push" of e-mail (or print mail) to "pull" people to the website.
Yet, as you mention, mass-email now faces the same problems as printed direct-mail. How can the sender differentiate his message from the rest of the detritus? As it is in any media, I think content is king. Whether using text (my preference) or HTML I think we must tailor our message to our target audience, give them the facts to be informed, the highlights to be interested, then a link to a website if they want to know more. (And you are absolutely right that these sites need to update this info in a timely fashion.)
What the mail looks like is really more a matter of personal preference. I keep graphics turned off just because they take longer to load, and most of the e-mails that use them don't do it very well. But then again I don't consider the e-mail to be a place where I'll be spending a lot of time. I just need the basic facts then I'll jump to the website.
Also one of the issues I've had is the inconsistent support for html in different programs. As Aaron indicates, the basic tags are supported, however CSS is not. Sometimes one must create cumbersome table layouts and use deprecated code to get things to layout properly, yet even so they won't look the same in each program.
I have to code things differently for an e-mail than I do for the web. Additionally not every program will let me paste in my code. Outlook will only let you if you copy from Word in which case it adds all sorts of extra MS code. As ridiculous as it seems, HTML e-mail still lies in the domain of duct tape and rubber bands.
p.s. Greg, What e-mail program are you using to distribute the USG newsletter in multiple formats?