An internal email newsletter?

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?

Podcast episode 1 – Dan Slee

Inspired by my friends Lloyd and Robert, I’m starting a regular-ish podcast. Here’s the first episode, where I chat with all round comms supremo Dan Slee, off of Comms 2.0.

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If you would like to subscribe to the podcast in your favourite podcasting app, the feed is http://feeds.soundcloud.com/users/soundcloud:users:13017131/sounds.rss

Show notes and related links (in a slightly jumbled order):

Bringing an old telly back to life with a Chromecast

Google-ChromecastGoogle’s Chromecast is a neat little device that plugs into the back of a television via the HDMI port, and then is supplied with power through a standards mini-USB charger that you might use with a smartphone.

It then enables you to ‘cast’ content from another device – a laptop, tablet or smartphone – onto the television, assuming the app you are using on said device supports Chromecast.

They are relatively low cost devices – just £30, and work rather effectively. If you have an Android phone, for example, you can play television programmes, movies or YouTube videos on your television set, so you are not reduced to squinting at a tiny screen.

We had an old telly which didn’t have anywhere to go in the house as we had run out of TV points. We could have bought and plugged in a DVD player, perhaps – but who on earth watches DVDs?

Instead, the Chromecast works perfectly. We can watch Netflix and BBC iPlayer (to name just two services) on the big screen, all controlled via whatever device we happen to have to hand.

I hadn’t really thought before about how streaming services like the Chromecast can be seen to “liberate” older tech like televisions from having to be where there is a cable to connect them to the aerial on the roof.

Plus it means I can now watch the World Cup in bed, which has to be a good thing, right?

Digital learning materials – any point to video?

Here’s one you can all help me with. When putting together learning materials – particularly aimed at a public sector audience – what’s the best format to use?

More specifically – is there any use in using video? Problems with video in the office include:

  • lack of sound cards / speakers / headphones to hear them
  • lack of access to video hosting sites
  • lack of bandwidth to download them
  • …and so on

For a couple of projects I’m looking at putting together learning resources for people about digital “stuff”, and I am leaning towards just writing lots of blog style bits of text with screenshots, rather than going down the screencast or video route.

It makes it chunkable so people can learn in bits if they choose, and of course text and images are a pretty universal, low bandwidth means of content delivery – they will work fine on whatever screen size, and won’t take ages to download.

Plus, by adding a social element, enabling people to talk about the content and discuss it in the context of their own work and projects, that will help embed the learning a little more.

What do people thing?

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