This week I would like to share some personal thoughts on our email broadcasting system (EBS). Our current system has been serving us for close to a decade now. Originally, it was designed as a quick and easy tool for departments and units to broadcast important and critical messages to a wide audience, such as the entire department or even the entire University population. Probably because of its easy of use, our number of email messages sent through this system has steadily risen to the current day volume of roughly 1,000 to 2,000 per month, out of which 100 to 200 were broadcasted to the entire staff/student population. Some of these messages are routine announcements and reminders of seminars and other events, while others are important messages that require special attention. Due to the volume of broadcasted email, it has become increasing hard to separate the needle from the hay, impacting our overall e-productivity.
Email is a type of communication that we sometimes characterize as “push” communication; content is pushed onto us whether we want it or not. An analogy is radio. Once you tune into a particular station, you have no control of what comes over. If a radio station constantly broadcasts advertisements that you are not interested in, you would probably change radio station very quickly. Unfortunately, we cannot change our email address. What we can change is to give people more flexibility in the way they receive these messages.
Earlier this year, we added “My EBS Options” to allow you to subscribe/unsubscribe to email broadcast messages from selected groups of departments/units. However, only a few percentages of users actually used this feature. Most people were probably afraid of potentially missing important emails and did not bother to unsubscribe anything.
In the summer, we experimented with using a different channel of communication; a more flexible ‘alert’ based broadcast that allows you to configure exactly how you want to be notified if a particular event occurred. We then moved all the “Furniture” email broadcast messages to this new platform. This allowed people who are interested in recycling furniture to either (1) read furniture availability through the web, or (2) get email “alerts” either immediately, daily or weekly. This has tremendously improved our quality of email broadcast. Firstly, it reduced unsolicited email for a category of broadcast emails. Secondly, it gave control back to the user. User can now decide how to get information - through web, by alerts, and soon by RSS (a “pull” type communication).
With the success of the “Furniture” alert system, we are now looking into replacing the archaic EBS with a modern communication platform that puts control back to the users. We are thinking of calling this new platform “The CityU Community Bulletin Board” - similar in utility to common community bulletin boards that you might find in supermarkets and coffee shops.
What’s New This Week:
- Green IT at CityU! - Student printing kills 93 trees each year; almost 2 trees destroyed every week. Don’t print; use softcopy instead of hardcopy!
