Email:  SEND

Will Schwalbe, co-author of a new book, Send:  The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home, recently presented a session for NPCC members about some of the pitfalls and mistakes people make using email.  Schwalbe notes that he and his co-author, David Shipley, are not the style police or arbiters; they merely wrote a book about the bad things that can happen on email — as well as the good that this communication vehicle has brought us.

While it may not be necessary to go as far as creating a formal email policy, a nonprofit manager may want, at a minimum, to share some of the points below with his or her staff.  Consider the fact that when a new employee sits down at his desk, someone at the organization shows him how to use his voicemail, don’t they?  Shouldn’t the same hold for email, especially given the pitfalls inherent in this medium? 

Why do we continue to make so many mistakes on email?  Email still has the curse of the new, even if you’ve been using it for 10-plus years.  Most of us are pretty comfortable with the common forms of business communication:  the letter, the phone and face-to-face meetings.  But email is a different beast.  People tend not to read (nor write) email with the care they do a formal letter.

Email can be used for too much and for things for which it’s not appropriate.  Sometimes it’s better and quicker to pick up the phone or walk down the hall to talk to the intended recipient. 

Tone

Email is an affectless medium, and its absence of tone encourages misunderstanding.  On email you can’t read someone’s emotions as you can in a face-to-face meeting or a phone conversation.  So, if you don’t consciously insert tone into an email, the default will be none. 

When we compose an email, we think we’re talking.  But the recipient doesn’t hear the tone that we intend.  What works in speech and letters can come out totally differently in email.  For example, “please” often comes across as a command or a rebuke instead of the gentle request you intended.  While most people don’t walk down the hall barking orders at others, an email might be read that way. 

Hostility can easily escalate.  Back and forths that start out slightly hostile will usually increase with each exchange.  If you find yourself using rhetorical questions, you’re probably in hostile territory.  Schwalbe recommends that sarcasm be omitted from emails.  He notes that email also tends to bring to the surface issues that are buried.  If any of these things start to happen, take it offline and go talk to the person. 

If you’re ever in questionable territory, Schwalbe suggests a trick he uses when he’s not sure about the message he’s writing:  Save it as a draft and send it to yourself first to re-read and see how it sits.  There’s something about this action that causes one to look at it in a different light.  You can then make changes, corrections, and adjust the tone.

The fact that email is fast is wonderful, but often it’s just too fast to keep up with.  And speed encourages sloppiness.  Consider the fact that if you get or send 50 email messages a day, the annual total may easily be 10,000 messages.

In email, punctuation counts and its absence can have vastly unintended consequences.  For example, a boss sent a congratulatory email to his employees about a recent endeavor, writing, “Congratulations on a successful project.”  One employee replied to all, “No thanks to you.”  He meant to say, “No, thanks to you.”  Because of the missing comma, his intended thanks became a slam.  Likewise, spelling and grammar should receive their fair share of attention.

Emails that are vague can eat up your entire morning.  Don’t make recipients guess who “John” is or wonder about missing details.  This will just lead to many back and forth exchanges.  Schwalbe’s research found that the average number of emails to set up a meeting between two people is seven. 

Email can feel like a total time waster, but at the same time it can give the impression of moving forward even if nothing is actually being accomplished.

Inappropriate emails are those that get you in trouble or worse, jail.  People tend to forget that an email can live forever.  Even if you think you’ve deleted it from your computer, it may live on in your office backups or with your ISP.  During legal discovery at Enron, it was found that one out of every 25 emails sent by employees included material that was either racist, sexist or homophobic. 

Some Do’s and Don’ts

Subject lines should be there and they should be succinct.  Schwalbe recommends changing the subject line every time to help recipients quickly see that the contents are different.

Wall paper — that colored and often patterned texture one can insert in the background of their emails — shouldn’t be there.

Schwalbe and Shipley think that exclamation points are great for conveying emotion.  Emoticons — the smiley-type symbols such as :) or  (; — are okay for colleagues, but usually not in formal email communications.

Short paragraphs are important to help aid people’s skimming tendencies.

Top replying is the practice of making sure your reply is at the top of a message and not buried at the bottom.  This is important for messages that go back and forth numerous times. 

Adhere to proper use of CC and BCC.  Those in the CC are generally not supposed to reply; they’re being sent the message FYI or as a courtesy.  When you’re sending to large groups, put the addresses in the BCC (blind carbon copy) section for confidentiality purposes.  In group emails, don’t “reply to all” if you should just reply to the original sender.  However, there may be times when it is appropriate to reply to all; just think for a moment about whether the entire group needs to see your message.

Signatures should be used.  Technically not a signature, it refers to text you can have automatically appended at the bottom of the message body.  This should include your name, title, company, address, and phone number.  Use them out of politeness: don’t make recipients guess who you are.  Also, some savvy marketing-types go beyond a signature and add a tag line promoting their cause, or a new program or publication.

NRN:  No Reply Necessary.  Using NRN is somewhat similar to FYI.  If you’re plagued by too many back-and-forth exchanges, and don’t want to hear back, let people know that you’re sending something with “no reply necessary.”  Use it in the subject line or in the first sentence of the body of the email.  But, you first may need to tell people what NRN means. 

Because some people feel overwhelmed by email, some offices and individuals are engaging in the practice of email-free Fridays or similar things such as no email between certain hours.  Schwalbe doesn’t think this makes sense, because for many of us business is conducted by email.  Demanding that employees not use their email for an entire day may just be counterproductive or too restrictive. 

However, given that so many people now sync their email with a handheld device, an office policy might include something along the lines of, “Don’t send an email to a co-worker after 5pm on a Friday to let them worry about it all weekend.”  Instead, save it as a draft and send it Monday morning.  One of the pitfalls of email is that it can make you cowardly.

Your response time to answer an email trains the people who are waiting for your reply.  So, if you always answer a message within two minutes, when you don’t reply you may well get peppered with a follow-up.  It might be best to delay your response time a bit. 

Email is fluid.  Its use grows out of the organization.  If you start to create a formal policy, recognize that the rules will vary from organization to organization and may even vary between departments.  The bottom line to consider is that an email is a communication that ultimately reflects on your organization.  Therefore, consider whether your people should be trained or if you need some usage guidelines.

Schwalbe notes that the title of their book, Send, is actually an acronym for: Simple: if your message isn’t, make it so; Effective:  make your message effective, as it might just be your only chance; Necessary:  if your email isn’t so, don’t send it; and, Done: if your email asks for something to be done, is it something you should do yourself, or are you just moving things off your desktop? 

He adds that if there are only two things that people take away, they are to “Think before you send; and send email you’d like to receive.”

Will Schwalbe was most recently senior vice president and editor in chief of Hyperion Books.  David Shipley is deputy editorial page editor and Op-Ed page editor of The New York Times.  Send can be purchased for $20 from Random House, Amazon and other online booksellers.  More about the book is at www.thinkbeforeyousend.com.

This article originally appeared in the March 2008 issue of New York Nonprofits, the monthly publication of the Nonprofit Coordinating Committee of New York, Inc. www.npccny.org