OPTIMISING E-MAIL PROTEST/REQUEST CAMPAIGNS

June 18, 2001

Dear Friends,

This letter is offered to you in order to share a system I have developed to improve the use of e-mails for lodging complaints, accolades or other matters, with government, business or similar organisations.

The Internet originated in the mainframe days – I have been sending electronic mail for over 30 years, and during that time have had to resolve issues which today, are again nullifying the impact of e-mail as a communications medium.

After some further investigation, by contacting government, business and other bodies on the receiving end of thousands of “protest” e-mails, here is a short summary of main bottlenecks:

· For many organisations, e-mail is a relatively new form of communication, and recipients can not cope with a deluge of e-mails from many different sources, all addressing the same subject.

EXAMPLE:

· 194 e-mail letters protesting about a Rhino hunt, occupy 11.994Mb on my hard disk as Microsoft Outlook eml’s in a *.dbx file. Now, if these same 194 people send an e-mail to say 55 government e-mail addresses, all attached to the same government server, you will load their server with 55 x 11.994 = 660 megabytes of email, which will then get distributed to 55 PC’s in the organisation.

What you’ll get is reaction – people do not have the time to drop all their other work to plough through 194 e-mails, all about the same thing. And, they will not have the time to reply. Also, their organisation will be very unhappy about tying up 55 employees with the work of processing 194 e-mails.

· Every r list has “lurkers” or “squatters”, people who join a list in order to sabotage the objectives of the main group. For instance, the moment a person posts an e-mail giving details of a planned complaints campaign, usually with a sample letter and all the e-mail addresses people are asked to write to, this same e-mail will go directly to the respondents’ addresses to warn them. They then set up a firewall, and every single e-mail from the group will be trashed before it even gets on the server database.

· The value of a r list from the point of view of its support for a requested campaign participation, cannot be gauged because there is very seldom any feedback,and no way of knowing how many are supporting you in your efforts.

· The “value” of a list is gauged by the support you get : there is no pint in being aList r if you’re not going to give support to others needing it, and none if appeals for help for sentient beings are not being responded to.

· There is no monitoring of letter content – individuals stray from the topic and introduce other “problems” of interest to them; and lurkers can add to the reaction by writing inappropriate e-mails. We want proaction – not rejection.

· Some people think it is doing our work good by sending viruses to respondents – or to us.

The way I handle a campaign from the e-mail letter point of view is illustrated as follows:

As the Action Originator, I send a single email to r lists detailing the problem, and the letter I suggest I send on behalf of everyone supporting the campaign. The feedback from the lists is extracted using the following program, which extracts all the e-mail addresses in my Outlook Express .dbx folder from responders and collects them in a single e-mail address text file:

A single email, containing the request and a list of all the e-mail addresses of people who support the campaign, is sent to (say) government or other organisations we’re trying to persuade to help solve the problem. Any responses I receive are collated in the same way, and I then advise everyone on the lists I received response from, by posting a single email to each list.

This system cuts down e-mail traffic by 99.93%, makes the people we send e-mails to very responsive, and generally gets results by speeding up the communication process.

Conflict resolution usually works better through negotiation – not confrontation.

I hope you find the above info useful, and if you want to use this system please do so – it works!

Thank you kindly

Roger Gould-King

Southern Times e-mag publisher

South Africa