Association Insight International & European | Page 14

Association Insights | Article

EMAIL DOESN’T START RELATIONSHIPS

- PEOPLE DO
BY JOHN SCARROTT

When he spoke at the Technology for Associations Congress in
July 2015, Design Business Association Membership Director, John
Scarrott, shared ten things he’d learned about email content, data
and Associations. In this article he talks about the challenges he
encountered and how he worked his way around them.

We have a lot to thank email for. It has made our lives
easier. It’s made us faster, more organised and better at
monitoring the impact of our communications. But there’s
a problem. Email has done this for everyone. And the
combination of convenience and universal availability is
potentially harmful to effective communication, particularly
when we equate pushing a button with the view that a
communication has happened. We need to supplement this
amazing technology, because it simply won’t do the whole
job by itself.
For associations, how they use email to get their messages
across becomes of critical importance, alongside the
technical ability to deliver it.

14 | © Associations Network 2015

1 People are squeamish about writing.
I was. I’d never written anything before outside of sales
emails and literature. When a member of your team
says, “I’d like to write” this can make people within the
association nervous.
Here are two things that I found worked to calm the nerves,
mine and my teams:
•E
 xperiment and test. Don’t rush in headlong with a grand
blog page. Do something low risk. Post the story to your
news page and see what happens. Then when it goes out
and nobody dies, you can move to the next level.
• Get someone else to review it before it goes out.
Be open. And don’t be precious about critique. Take
suggestions on board and make changes where they
improve the piece.

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