An online notebook
Issue 11 of my newsletter was sent out this morning.
You can read it on the web here to see what it’s like.
If you are already getting email alerts for this blog, don’t worry – the newsletter contains completely new content which doesn’t appear here.
If you’d like to sign up, you can do (for free!) at daveslist.io.
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?
Did you know I have an email newsletter? You probably do, and are fed up of me going on about it. Sorry.
It’s called Daveslist, and you can sign up for it at daveslist.io.
The newsletter is basically a list of five or so links I have spotted lately, cobbled together with a little bit of commentary explaining why I think they are interesting.
You might just find it a simple way to keep on top of interesting tech stories without having to dig them out yourself.
I’ve just hit send on the latest issue, which you can read on the web, if you like. Try before you buy! (Although, it’s free).
I put it together using a fantastic tool called Goodbits, which makes curating an email newsletter so easy it’s untrue.
Or maybe not actually rethinking email, but taking it back to what it was meant to be about…
Working with a colleague the other day in a government organisation, I saw him looking for a document, that he was sent in an email. He was looking for it in his email client (Outlook in this case), in an inbox that contained thousands of emails, and lots of email sub folders, all of which contained hundreds, if not thousands, of more emails.
He tried clicking his way through, sorting and resorting folders in different ways, without success. He tried the search function, also to no avail.
This, I thought, is madness. Many people in many organisations do exactly the same thing. They keep hold of thousands of emails, many kept unread for one reason or another, because they might be needed in future, or because they act as reminders to do something, or because they have file attachments that might be useful.
Here’s the thing though. Your email client was set up to receive emails, and to send them. It’s not a task manager. It’s not a file store.
Of course, it’s not individuals fault that they are misusing their email in this way. After all, if a genuinely better, more usable alternative was available, they would use it. But sadly the productivity and document management tools available to your average worker in a big organisation are rarely very usable.
I’d be really interested to know how big a problem this is for people – as I have a little idea around something that could help.
So, are you drowning in email you don’t feel like you can delete? Let me know below!
I had a go at doing an email newsletter once before – put a signup form here on the blog, got quite a few people to subscribe, and then never got round to sending a single issue. Useless!
Part of my trouble then was that I wasn’t that comfortable with the software. Recently though, for a few projects, I’ve been playing with MailChimp and been dead impressed with it. So, I thought I would have another go.
Click here to sign up for DaveMail, a weekly email newsletter that will feature a fresh article that won’t get published here on the blog, plus a list of great links for anyone wanting the best of the web’s coverage of digital engagement and other technology stuff.
I’ll be publishing every Sunday, so there will hopefully be at least one nice email waiting for you on Monday morning!