I have been thinking about email lately. Email predates the World Wide Web as we know it. In some settings, tackling email issues evokes about as much enthusiasm as planning for shoveling snow in the Northeast winter. Social media and what’s new on the web generally seem the forward place to be for communication. Yet email lives.
I recently helped facilitate Idealware’s debut of a new day-long email fund-raising boot camp training. Third Sector New England hosted this first one, and Idealware hopes to replicate it elsewhere. Toward the end, I suddenly had this flash. A couple dozen communications and development managers in the room, and not one “is email dead?” question all day. We had a great, collaborative spirit throughout the day based on what I see in hindsight as some shared understandings:
Email tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response make broadcast emails and e-newsletters easier and more professional than ever.
Email broadcast or newsletter tools are content management for email. They facilitate the same collaborative editing and planning that content management systems bring to the Web. They empower you to track statistics against goals. They bring consistent design templates to email. They enable reliable web links. They bring reliable viewing to different email readers.
Writing and editing email messages resembles other writing in some ways, but has its own professional features—such as brevity.
On the downside, the sea of spam email swims in and other challenges make successfully delivering and getting attention email harder than ever. Email tool bring an easy discipline to the legal requirements for safe email and to maximizing “deliverability” to your lists.
And having a full data strategy—integrating with forms on the web, contact databases and such, segmenting lists—won’t come without serious effort.
Even so, whether my organization’s constituents mainly, primarily or only secondarily look for email news, email remains a critical part of the communications circuit, requires planning and campaign models.
These expectations and understandings vary by generation and community context. (And globally, they also vary by technology infrastructure. Where the Internet infrastructure is weak, mobile text based messaging is stronger.)
Effective Email is one part strategy, one part design and one part data management. You can only learn so much by checking email stats. You need to correlate email campaigns with the full range staff and community advocacy and services that reach your constituency -- and the sub-groups and segments within it.
This was my third email training in the last few months. With each, it has become less of a guilty pleasure again.
Email is in the news these days, at least here in Boston and Massachusetts. Twitter, Facebook, and political blogs have elbowed their way in as organizing tools, yet incidents in the lowly world of email have had a huge public impact.
If you don’t live in Massachusetts, our local politics may not interest you and who can blame you. Bear with me a minute.
How long do email posts persist?
Here in Boston, missing emails from the computer of the Mayor’s chief adviser have become one of a handful of widely-discussed fall campaign issues. We have a mayor with a strong reputation for attention to all the details in all the neighborhoods, including perhaps emailing about them. And we have challengers focusing on the need for greater transparency and decentralization of decision-making. These have been somewhat abstract differentiators. Nothing like a chief aide’s apparent penchant for erasing all his email every day to focus the public attention.
What’s fascinating to me is how much public information about technology this incident has brought about.
Infrastructure: The public is learning stuff about the technical infrastructure of backing up emails on a server, also important in the second incident, below. Everyone should know now that it’s the norm for their email to exist in more one place. It’s not just on your desktop. Once it’s out there, a message’s traces may persist for a long time.
In this case, while things were not automatically and consistently kept in multiple places, emails that we’re cc’d or forwarded to others leave their own traces. Multiple computers leave traces. Sender’s outbound email leave traces.
While there has been a lot of discussion recently about what happens to personal details on Facebook and other social media, we all got a big fat reminder about the persistence of email.
Forensics: Second, on the technical side, those that could stand it learned more about computer forensics than you would in a season of 24. Maybe 2 seasons. Are things you erase from a hard drive really erased? Not if someone is willing to spending time and money recovering those electronic wisps and traces of the past. Typically, even if you reformat a hard drive, a lot of stuff is still there. When you are done with a computer, in addition to the environmental concerns about all the hardware, better be pretty sure what is going to happen with that hard drive.
Open Government: Third, given that some of the missing emails may factor in a corruption case involving another politician, if they are truly gone, this may violate the state’s public record laws. This may point to the most important public information side of the incident.
Transparency in government operations means more than just having cameras in hearing rooms. It means that the sum total of data collected and used—including emails—may be of interest to policy advocates and others. Tabular data on services provided and business status may have more direct value. And there may not be much to learn from plowing through tedious emails by the thousands from the desks of policy makers. Yet I can imagine that many people now imagining seeing a “power map” of the social web of who corresponds with who and in what frequency at City Hall and other government offices.
Email shows politics in charter school decision
The second email-ish political incident is playing out at the state level. We have had a look at highly embarassing “private” email correspondence between Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Secretary of Education Paul Reville. We see that a critical decision regarding a new charter school had as much to do with politics as pedagogy. What, politics in charter school decisions? This is like Captain Renault confronting Humphrey Bogart with gambling in “Rick’s Cafe” in Casablanca. Education activists have been trying to make this point for years, and one tiny email exchange blows it wide open for everyone.
Both incidents are lessons in the advocacy potential of Open Government.
The irony about all this is that it also reveals the twin headaches of email in IT or personal computer infrastructure. Email can be one of the hardest things to ensure safe back-up. Whether to tape, disk or off-site cloud storage, you generally need software specifically rated to back up an Outlook mailbox or Exchange server files. And if you have off-site hosted Exchange or use Google Apps webmail, you have even more complicated issues in insuring your organization controls and retains the archives it wants. Blackberries and such add even more complexity to infrastructure and back-up issues.
If the city issue shows that email archives can be harder to maintain than, say, a project document folder, the state issue shows that sometimes a email exchange you thought casual, ad hoc, and private may turn out to have a life of its own. Email copies may exist in many places aside from your own desktop, and they maybe there for a really long time, and they may get forwarded when and where you least expect it.
And both political problems also show that even if you take care in what you write, you can’t control what comes streaming into your Inbox unscreened every day. Things others send you can make trouble even if they’re not malware.
In the continuum of attention to what we write these days, Instant Messages or cell phone SMS texts sit at one end of casualness. A polished, multiply edited and vetted report or proposal lies at the other end. Tweets, blogs, social media participation, along with emails all occupy some middle ground. While quite old in Internet terms, email--whether person-to-person or broadcast out—needs new strategy, care and attention that reflects its continuing persistence.
I’ve been thinking about task management lately. Seemed like a good thing to reflect on over the long weekend. If you are like me, the biggest problem about task management is just plain old too many. Some weeks I feel like I’m gliding through my lists until a loved one reminds me, I just have too many.
If you have too many tasks, then you need to focus first on having fewer of them. That’s what some systems (philosophies? Self-help psychologies? Emergency medical care?) are all about. Dave Allen's "Getting Things Done" has a lot of popularity in this department. If you haven’t read the book, check it out. Most people probably can’t fully live the GTD way. I personally grant permission to cherry pick from its choicest rules. Things like, if you can deal with something in less than two minutes, do it now. If you can’t, put it where you can find it so you don’t have to clutter your mind with it until you can deal with it. And on from there. Too Much Mail
For many of us, even before we get to our task lists per se, we have to face our email inbox. My inbox is like a tide washing up new tasks every day. I’m not going to tell you exactly how big my inbox is right now. It’s embarrassing. I’m working on it.
I get a lot of help form using the GTDInbox for Firefox + Gmail. GTDInbox adds a life-saving layer of task buttons built on top of Gmail’s labeling. (GTDInbox is independent of Dave Allen, and just carries forward some of the methodology. ) If you use Outlook, the Dave Allen company (www.davidco.com) has a nifty full-featured add-on. And if you use Thunderbird or other mail, Dave A offers an inexpensive PDF guide to adapting GTD manually.
For me, for now, GTDInbox rules. You can find it as a standard free Firefox add-in, and you can learn more at GTDinbox.com. I’m sure a premium version is heading our way, and I suspect a lot of folks will jump for it.
Too Many Projects
After too many tasks, my second biggest problem is having too many projects. Collaborative software commonly used for project management software generally comes with ways of dividing up project tasks. In Basecamp (www.basecamphq.com), you have a simple structure of milestones that give you due-dates, and to-do lists that assign responsibilities for meeting those dates. As I mentioned here recently, the new Open Atrium for Drupal has projects and cases, also in a clear intuitive organization that favors collaborative discussion, blogging, and document management. Microsoft Sharepoint, Central Desktop, Zoho and others also have their equivalent.
These systems are definitely a great thing for getting a team already discussing project goals and needs to now focus in on discrete chunks of work. If you are blessed to not have too many projects, this can also work for your individual daily task management. I use and need these features. Yet for much of what I need to get on top of every day, I find myself getting bogged down in navigating down and up the hierarchy of client-project-milestone-tasks.
For Basecamp at least, there are cool Windows or Mac desktop integration add-ons that simplify the to-do process. See http://basecamphq.com/extras for ideas. Some are even free; some have costs that add up as you add users. I have sporadically used the Project Recon add-in.
Like many people, even if I end up duplicating PM entries, I need to quickly get in, order and prioritize all the things to do today, tomorrow, this week and beyond in one place. I need a task list tool, pure and simple. Sometimes I come back to the idea that the best task list tool is the same small notebooks I carry around all the time. Notes with pen and paper. If you have been at meetings with me, then you have likely seen me with one of those black moleskine notebooks. http://www.moleskines.com/klmb712.html. Compact, rugged, no batteries and low carbon footprint, visual, fun, well-engineered, works in weak wireless area all the rest.
Where the notebook falls short is getting those tasks on your calendar. There is definitely a virtue to coming back to my desk, looking through my notebook entries for the day, and reorganizing them into on-line memos, events and tasks. To be useful, those tasks have to wind up on or close to my calendar. That’s the biggest advantage of a software task list.
Too Many Tasks
Maybe you still use a paper pocket calendar. Maybe you can fit your tasks in the margins of the dates on the calendar, and don't have to share your task list with anyone else. I admire this and recognize that you live a different life than me. Fortunately for me and probably most readers here, there are some amazing good software choices for simple task lists. I’ll mention a three favorites, and hope you will help fill in the gaps with others.
Google tasks: If you use Google calendar, why not use its own task list? The task capability has been recently spruced up to include list categories and dates. For most purposes, will do the trick, and if you have mobile Gmail, you can see them there as well.
Remember the Milk(http://www.rememberthemilk.com/) adds some pretty nifty features. You primarily use it on its web site, which has a simple, uncluttered interface. And you can add your notes and stuff to a task as it comes into play. You can do more visual organizing of your tasks, with a tag cloud, location map and other options you may find soothing as you face a daunting list of things to do.
And lots of cool stuff being done through the RTM API to lets you see your tasks when and where you want. You can also integrate RTM (yes, its adherents have claimed its 3 letter acronym) with your google or Apple iCal calendar. It will send you reminders via email, SMS text, Twitter, or IM, iPhone app, or off-line Google gadget. And if all else fails, you can share your task list with trusted contacts, who will hopefully help you reduce the task load rather than add to them. RTM has enough going for it that I've read blog posts arguing for abandoning more complete project communication systems like Basecamp in favor of just sharing lists with contacts on RTM.
Last I’ll mention Evernote. Evernote has flexible task lists like the others. It is also a polished, modern desktop app that enables pretty slick note taking, both text and web/multimedia clips. If you use your laptop in a lot of meetings, take notes on phone calls, or are constantly clipping articles and multimedia for later reference and writing, evernote has a lot going for it. It syncs an installed Mac or Windows desktop application with an easy, secure web site. Unfortunately, the desktop app will not run on my trusted lightweight Ubuntu netbook, but the web interface is cool enough I might go back to it again.
All three of these are ideal where you do have to manage tons of tasks day in and day out, and your your immediate tasks don’t always line up with a small, tight, hierarchical list of projects. Try them all and see what supports you best.
And having finished this, I get to cross an item off of my task list! Even better, thinking through the choices and casually interviewing a few folks recently about their habits has been therapeutic. Still too many tasks, and yet more confident about the choices in managing them.
For a recent workshop on email, I planned to cover the familiar point that effective email newsletters drive traffic to one's website. Use the web to have people take action, make donations, or sign up for further organizing on your website. And “Click this link” not only opens the door to useful activity, it also helps avoid the dreaded email attachment.
Sending a mass email with a word document, PDF or other attachment has many interrelated negatives associated with it. It may clog the mail server, get you tagged as a spammer, run into anti-virus software at the recipient end, may require installed software the reader doesn't have, may be presumptuous about their willingness to open your document. For these kinds of reasons, email newsletter software (like Constant Contact) may let you store logos or other images for your newsletter and yet block or make it difficult to attach documents.
In this case, as my workshop partner Linda and I prepared, we realized that the network members invited to the training had way more flexibility in their email than in their websites. There would not be much point talking about web activism and avoiding email attachments with folks with static, hard-to-update websites. And many had a lot to say in their emails, and did regularly attach documents to make up for lack of access to their website.
If you find yourself in that situation, here are a series of workarounds to attaching documents that you may find useful. And in fact, they often have virtues in themselves by offering tagging and other social networking features to increase the reach and value of your message.
Google documents: Upload flyers and other short document to google and publish as a public google document. Easy, free, familiar.
Here are some other initially free, with premium options available, ways to store fliers, documents, slideshows and other materials. Some just provide the file repository. Others, like slideshare and issuu, aslo include a convenient on-line viewer for slideshows or other publications.
Of course, these generally assume that whatever the privacy level of the email news and list, the attachments you mass mail have public value. In some cases, you can add authorized viewers, though this adds to the labor of posting the document.
Another approach is Yousendit.com, a convenient site typically used for sharing large files with small groups. You can also inexpensively purchase a premium service that would allow you to share documents with larger groups.
Ultimately, the lowering the cost and complexity of migrating websites to content management systems such as drupal, joomla or plone will overtime reduce the need for solutions like this. More and more organizations do have the ability to post “read more” content on their website with little more difficulty than the original email. In the meantime, the next notch up from the other solutions here and an interim step toward a website upgrade could be to start an attached blog using standard blog site services such as blogger or wordpress. Have the read more information on the blog and leave the problems of the static main site for another day.
I'm sure there are many other good solutions to this problem, and would love to hear yours.
What do you do five years after shaking things up with Google Maps. If you are Lars and Jens Rasmussen, the core developers behind Google Maps, you apply yourself to a different way of thinking about collaboration and communication over the Internet.
Spend an hour and a quarter watching Lars, Jens and their project manager Stephanie Hannon and their crew on Youtube from the June Google I/O conference. Its hard not to start thinking, I could use this thing in my work and when can I try it out.
Background. Email has been around for almost forty years, starting out before the web and the Internet as we know it now. Today, we often have a love/hate relationship with our Inbox. In just the last couple years, whole new realms of team communication, web-base collaboration and social networking sharing have grown up as alternatives to “pure” email.
Problem is, unless you can effectively live on line in one or two of these collaborative cloud worlds, you often still depend on email. And if not email, then other things that push new information out to me to alert me to go back and look. I use Basecamp every day to organize discussion about the projects I’m involved in. I depend on it sending messages by email or feeding reminders into my calendar. If you work with a team using a Google document, a Gliffy process diagram, or a Slideshare presentation, you need to have it send an email to let everyone else know. It's cool that in MS Office 2007 – and now in Open Office 3.1—you can not only “track changes,” but also share comments with other editors. You still have to send the new version out and wait for a response.
Some things get a bit closer to real time collaboration. In a Google doc, you can be on a conference call and all take notes in the same document. Kind of crazy distracting at first, but really useful once you get used to it.
I mentioned dropbox in a recent blog, and now have been playing around with drop.io as well. These give let you share a folder either among your own various computers or else with a team. But you might not notice an update of your team’s collaborative materials unless someone tells you. Email, text, phone, IM, maybe Twitter or private micro blog environments still are needed to complete the communication loop.
Google Wave wants to change that. In the first place, it combines some of the best elements of Gmail, Instant Messaging, and Google Docs. An email becomes a Wave, an organized and organizing conversation. Instead of message and response, you can just respond by editing within the message, so a message becomes a Google Doc. You can discuss points within it by inserting an IM-like discussion at one or another points in the message. Or a poll, or other interactive feature.
So, if four of you want to draw lessons from yesterday’s workshop and blog about it, what can you do? Start a wave with your notes. Others can now edit it real time. And real time will mean seeing everyone’s contributions appear character by character. To broaden the discussion, you don’t forward an email, you just add them to the Wave, and they can use the playback feature to see everyone’s contributions as they came in.
Drag and drop photos from the event and the Wave will automatically have an embedded photo gallery everyone can tag, label or add to. Other one click tools allow you to add links or embed youtube or other external objects.
The line between an email discussion and a collaborative document has gotten a lot narrower. Instead of debate over whether email is dead, Google Wave aims to remake it into what it ought to be today.
Using the Wave API, once your team is far enough along with your summary of yesterday’s event, you can embed it in a blog post or insert into a social media page (much as with a Google map today). As the Wave gets further refined, it will be updated real time on that external page. Extensions based on the API will do simultaneous translation, so if I’m seeing the Wave in English, a team member in Mexico might see it in Spanish. The context sensitive spell checker fixed “icland is an icland” to become: “Iceland is an island.”
Usable versions of this seem months away. Maybe Google figured they would preview so much of it so early because they wanted to get developer attention as early as possible. Other things that will improve options available to collaborative teams also seem in the works. For example, Drupal 7, also due to begin appearing end of this year, also will have some amazing steps forward in collaboration and process integration. Discussion in Drupal circles has already begun, Drupal 7 versus Wave, or Drupal 7 PLUS Wave.
Like other cloud based collaboration initiatives, Wave poses privacy concerns. It will be easy, but will it be as secure as, say, a Drupal 7 collaborative site? One very exciting aspect of the Google Wave model, is that in addition to having the usual rich open environment for developers, the whole project will be Open Source. You will be able to create your own private label Wave site, and presumably ensure the privacy levels appropriate to your work and audience. Now, that seems different for Google.
How important is all this stuff? The collaborative tools we all use today make a huge difference in the creativity, practicality and effectiveness of all kinds of projects today. In its June 15 issue, even as the Business Week cover story bemoaned the slowing down of innovation in the United States, it also highlighted “Cloud Computing’s Big Bang for Business.” Google Wave will be a big part of this by this time next year. Watch the video, then sign up and check it out at http://wave.google.com.
A report from Forrester Research (outlined in this ReadWriteWeb post) suggests that for most enterprises, hosting email with Google is the cheapest option available. In general, outsourcing your email, and putting it into "the cloud" is most likely going to be more cost effective than hosting it yourself.
As nonprofit organizations look to trim budgets in this coming tough climate, is this the time to outsource email? Outsourcing email saves you from buying new servers, paying for Exchange seats, worrying about spam filtering, etc.
So what are the downsides? The downsides come from the basic fact that your email is not really in your total control anymore. If you are using something like GMail, you need to find a way to back it up. You can use a mail client like Outlook or Apple Mail, which loads a copy of the email locally. There are other ways to back up Gmail if you want to stick to using the web client.
For some organizations that do sensitive work (Chinese democracy activists for example, or anarchists and the like) using a service like GMail is a security risk - if Google or most providers are asked to hand over information, you can bet they will, since it is in their best interest to do so, not to fight a government. If your organization runs the risk of coming to the attention of the powers that be, GMail or a service like it is probably not a good option. Nor is it a good option if you need to share confidential client information.
However, there are good nonprofit-focused email/hosting providers, like May First/People Link, or Electric Embers, that can be much more secure places to keep sensitive data, since they are smaller, and work with a lot of activist groups.
If you make a careful choice, and make sure you've got backup plans, outsourcing email could be a good money saver during this time of trimming budgets.
Subscribe through Feedburner