Communication - E-mail

The University has always seemed to struggle to communicate with it's students. So this post is hopefully the first in many looking at this issue. Let me know if you have any ideas about this general area.

The University is the only organisation that I have ever dealt with that requires me to use their own e-mail account rather than my personal one. Every time I buy something online, register on a website, set up a bank account or anything else online I can use whatever e-mail address I want. No questions asked.

But with UofG I am constantly told to check the Uni email regularly because they send lots of important stuff to it. Now that claim may be a slight exaggeration as many of the Uni e-mails sent to me are either not meant for me, irrelevant or pointless. But that's for another post.

Back to the point. If the Uni is sending importnat information out then its first aim should be to ensure that that info gets to it's intended recipient. A lot of students check their e-mail religiously but it's usually their personal e-mail that they've had for years. Their Uni account goes unchecked for weeks if checked at all. This is borne out by Uni research that was undertaken a few years ago. It showed that less than half of the student body were checking their Uni e-mail. Now that's a serious problem if you need to get an urgent message out or if you need to inform a lot of students about something complex.

The question that was raised after this research was "How can we get more students to use their Uni e-mail?". This was probably the wrong approach. The question should be WHY are students not using their e-mail. My experience has been that it's for a number of reasons:

• Boredom - They used to then gave up as nothing interesting was ever sent to them.
• Practical - The Uni e-mail system just isn't as good as the free commercially provided systems e.g. Hotmail, Yahoo and Google.
• Too lazy - Can't be bothered to check more than one account.
• Annoyed - The Uni e-mail just gets full of rubbish, most of it isn't even relevant to me.

The obvious answer seems to be allow personal addresses to be set as the primary e-mail address. It's not difficult as almost all other businesses seem to handle it ok. The secondary problem seems to be targeting e-mails properly, I received over 200 e-mails from the Uni between early October to mid-May in my first year. That's around 2 per working day (i.e. term-time). That's a lot.

E-mails need to be controlled, the amount limited and much of it should be opt-in. If I don't want to receive e-mail about the Careers service or the Choir then I should have the choice. By opting in each department would gain access to a group of students INTERESTED in what it has to say. This would be a lot more effective than the current blunt approach.

I think I've run out of steam on this one - Any ideas?