Here’s an idea for those wanting to get some engagement going within your organisation. Send some emails.
Actually, let’s be more specific. Send some really good emails.
People are inundated with email at work, and adding to the burden might sound counter-productive. How about sending an email that reduces the burden though?
Since I’ve been publishing daveslist, I’ve had some great feedback from people. Some of it has been commenting on the links I have shared, but most is just conversation, often responding to the brief introductory paragraph, which is often not particularly tech-related, but a brief note about what I’ve been up to.
It strikes me that email is great way to engage with people, when you get the tone and the content right, and it’s a lot easier for people to just hit ‘reply’ to provide a response, rather than visiting a blog post and filling in a comment form, say.
So how about you start an internal email newsletter within your organisation? Maybe do it weekly, on a Friday, and summarise the important stuff that has been going on that week that people really can’t afford to miss. You don’t even need to use a sophisticated newsletter delivery service like MailChimp – to get started just use the BCC field.
This could take the form of links to useful and relevant blog posts and news items online, or an intranet update that people may have missed.
Or, how about you use your email newsletter to curate the best and most important of all the other emails people may have received, and not quite got round to reading? In other words, saving people the bother of having to work out which are the emails they have to read.
Starting an email newsletter for your colleagues to opt-in to might be a great way to start getting your message across – why not give it a go?
This is exactly what we did at Makeshift. We made a little app that other people can use too – it’s called Linkydink: http://linkydink.io
The idea is that the you add links to a linkydink group, and then every working day (so not at the weekend), all of the contributed links get added to an email that gets sent out at 8am. It’s great for the commute – you get to catch up on interesting links when you’re in the right context.
Another interesting thing we added is that you can make a group public, so other people can subscribe and listen in to the links your team are sharing. Right now some of the folks at GDS are using it and their links are fascinating!
I’m a LinkyDink lover too! 🙂
We’ve been doing this for about 9 months now – 1st Friday of each month – just a few links to stories and blogposts that people might find interesting across digital, open data and data vis stuff. The biggest challenge is making sure only to add links that aren’t blocked internally!
I can see how that would be a problem!
How’s it going? Good levels of engagement?
How did you go about getting signups – or do you just add people to the list in the hope they’d value it?
The engagement levels are ok-ish. We get a decent amount of emails opened and links clicked through.
Initially we added a few people to get things started them promoted it to internal groups we thought might be interested..
Rumours of the death of email are much exaggerated…
I’ve just sent out the fourth issue of my monthly ‘Creativity Works’ internal newsletter. It’s a mix of: articles about what the team is doing, case studies of creative/innovative practice (external and internal) and interesting creativity related stuff, I usually have five or six fairly short articles that link to longer articles on our intranet/ further information on t’internet. I initially developed the format of the newsletter with a small group of interested colleagues and tested the first issue with a larger group. This has helped get the content balance right. Open and click through rates are high. Subscription is growing steadily. I’ve had quite a bit of postive feedback.
heads off to check email stats for the 10th time today
That’s great to hear Lesley!