How the Christian Institute uses e-mail…
Over 10,000 individuals are signed up to receive e-mail alerts from the Christian Institute. It is a quick, cheap and versatile way of informing Christians about important issues for their prayers and action. To send out the same information by post would take days to prepare and would cost thousands. We simply wouldn’t have the resources to do it.
Each Friday, the Institute uses e-mail to send an at-a-glance summary of the week’s headline stories. It’s the kind of thing a person could read in 60 seconds. It helps Christians keep up-to-date with the latest developments, on issues like medical ethics, religious liberty and marriage. Many church leaders say they find our ‘In the news this week’ e-mail extremely helpful in keeping informed.
One of the great advantages of e-mail is that a user can interact with it. Instead of sending a huge long report in one message, we can give a simple headline with a short description and a reader can click through for more details.
In the same way, we can send links to online video, audio and downloadable publications. It’s all about making things easy and useful for people. Brief, clear, simple messages that don’t waste words are by far the most effective. To sign up, visit christian.org.uk/signup
E-mails can get you fired…
Much care should always be taken when sending e-mails. Not only are they admissible as evidence in court, but they can easily be misinterpreted.
A chief executive of an American health care company, Cerner Corporation, wrote an e-mail that turned out to be disastrous for the company as well as the morale of company employees.
In the e-mail, employees were accused of being lazy and managers threatened with being fired. It seemed the employee parking lot was not full at 8am and was nearly empty by 5pm each day. After the e-mail showed up on a Yahoo Financial Message Board, investors began questioning the leadership of the company. The result was a plunge of 22 per cent in the share price of the company’s stock on Wall Street.
Or consider the case of Vicki Walker, an accountant from Auckland, New Zealand, who was fired for sending e-mails to work colleagues which ’caused disharmony in the workplace’.
The company she worked for, ProCare Health, claimed that her e-mails advising colleagues how to fill out staff claim forms were confrontational due to the use of a sentence written all in capital letters and highlighted in blue, with the time and date highlighted in red. For these crimes against humanity, Walker was fired from the position she had held at the company for two years.
