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Home : Mass E-mail User Group : September 2009 meeting notes
The September 29, 2009 MEUG was well attended, with about 15 people attending. The internal communications discussion took most of the meeting. Tips and tricks for handling the plain text message part will be rescheduled for the next meeting.
After introductions all around, Jennie Lijewski, from University Relations, noted the recent increase in broken opt-out URLs, particularly for mailings to alums and donors (using University of Minnesota Foundation/GEL lists). She reminded us that we are legally obligated to provide working opt-out URLs and that this is federal law, not just a University recommendation. Questions to ecomm@umn.edu.
Matt Sumera from Internal Communications, the main presenter, spoke about internal communications frameworks and services currently in place, the use of Lyris for large-scale internal communications, guidelines for internal mass e-mail, and communications planning, before opening up discussion. Matt provided two handouts that will be made available on the Internal Communications Web site in the [near?] future.
Matt talked briefly about the Administrative E-mail Lists (AEL), the successor to the Deans, Directors, and Department Heads (DDD) lists. Matt noted that the DDD lists were manually managed and there were no clear guidelines for who would receive DDD messaging. The AEL lists were developed to remove manual member management by identifying job codes for University administrators and selecting recipients on the fly. Matt talked about the two ways to send to AEL lists: using the LISTSERV for pre-defined groups (by campus/site) and using Lyris, working with his group, when additional restrictions on the audience are required. Matt was asked about the “other” group, for recipients not attached to a campus. Matt noted that the other group contained only a handful and that the “all” group contained these people.
Matt also spoke on the VIP mail service, used to send to large audiences (e.g., all TC students). See http://www1.umn.edu/is/vip-mail/vip-help.html for more information.
Lyris was mentioned as a tool for sending to large internal audiences and that Internal Communications will work with VP-level communications and IT staff.
On guidelines, Matt noted that internal communications should generally adhere to the standard guidelines for mass e-mail from the University, as described on the eCommunications Standards Web site. Also, a standard footer has been adopted that includes the name of the unit sending or approving the message and who the message was sent to. Sarah Bjorkman from Extension noted that this is useful at the unit level, as it indicates to communication staff whether or not their own staff would have already received the information.
Matt finally spoke on communications planning and “stop the line.” Asking why and to who aren’t asked often enough, and telling a VP that the message they’d like to send isn’t appropriate poses a major challenge at the central level.
Chris Goodland from the Office of Information Technology (OIT) noted that focus groups (?) conducted in the past indicated that their audiences were interested in the ability to opt-in or out by topic, and understood and wanted well-segmented messaging. Chris also mentioned that in her experience non-communications staff says that students don’t want e-mail, while students say that want it, or prefer it to other forms of communication.
Matt mentioned the approach of combining messages going out. Sarah from Extension noted that they moderate lists and almost always deny messages to all Extension, as they can be targeted more carefully or aren’t time-sensitive and can be included in their bimonthly newsletter.
Matt noted that there have been no requests to removed people from H1N1 communications, contrary to all other internal communications to broad audiences, and there has been no decline in open rates.
Going around the room, different units went over their internal communications. [Notes on this are scattered; please send corrections & additions to ecomm@umn.edu].
| Unit | Methods |
|---|---|
| Extension | Intranet and internal e-mail newsletter, very intertwined |
| Carlson School | Little or no internal print |
| Libraries | Internal newsletter(s), but not managed by the communications group |
| UofM Foundation | Intranet |
| Athletics | Intranet, but mostly department-level LISTSERVs |
| College of Liberal Arts | Formerly had an internal newsletter for whole college, reevaluating |
| College of Continuing Education | Intranet; stories and articles sent through LISTSERVs by whole college or department; no breaking news |
| Office of Information Technology | Internal weekly newsletter, wiki, all-OIT staff meetings |
| Institute of Technology | Intranet (mostly static), LISTSERVs for departments, some faculty/staff/student mass e-mail for whole college |
| Academic Health Center | Bimonthly e-mail newsletter to students, staff, and faculty |
| Cancer Center | Bimonthly newsletter, intranet coming soon |
The subject of effectively managing members came up. By job code or central data was noted as the ideal, but some groups do manual pulls on unclear criteria, some use CRMs. The minutiae of job and student information can make it difficult to select the correct audience and it requires someone with an excellent understanding of the data. Human Resources Management Systems is a good resource for HR data.
The question of whether or not to send to supervisors came up. Some groups do take this approach and trickle down. Chris Goodland noted that OIT has supervisor meetings. Liz Turchin from CCE noted problems in the past with non-supervisors receiving supervisor e-mails.