Communication technologies today are amazing. Yet, I hear more rumbling about The University of Montana’s inability to communicate effectively with students, employees and other constituents than ever before.  Nobody is happy.

I don’t know if people are any happier at North Carolina State University, but NC State offers a nice contrast to UM when it comes to campus communication strategies. UM has (sort of) adopted a tool called “Official Notices” for official campus communication. Official Notices can be read in OneStop and/or delivered to email addresses. NC State has adopted Twitter as an official channel of communication. They built a page that aggregates “official” Tweets from multiple departments.

The medium is not the message. Twitter doesn’t guarantee better communication than UM’s Official Notices. But NC State has adopted a strategy very different from UM. Without judging the quality or effectiveness of the communication, here is a numbers comparison between UM and NC State on official communication.

Number of messages in my UM Official Notices inbox:

8 over the last 26 days

Number of Tweets on the NC State Twitter page:

39 in the last 21 hours

Number of departments with ability to send UM Official Notices:

9

Number of departments at NC State with Twitter accounts:

62

Percentage of UM messages that link to a web page for more information:

37%

Percentage of NC State Tweets that link to a web page for more information:

67%

Average number of characters in UM Official Notices:

1,782

Average number of characters in NC State Tweets

108

Comments?

The guidelines acknowledge the challenge of writing policy for an ever-expanding and changing set of non-University web systems. In response, the guidelines focus on constraints imposed by FERPA and other privacy laws and policies related to a student’s educational record; HIPAA and Montana health information privacy laws; federal and state archival and retrieval requirements for official electronic communication; and state laws regarding personnel evaluations.

The draft guidelines are available on the web at:
www.umt.edu/it/policies/externalwebsystems.aspx.

The English department, in collaboration with UM legal counsel and Information Technology, drafted a Facebook best practices document to help guide other UM departments. The guide was developed prior to Facebook’s recent upgrade, so it already needs modification. Your thoughts are welcome.

Our message to UM students and employees is simple:

Never respond to email asking you to provide personal information

The University of Montana will never ask you for personal information by email

How you can help

Campus departments can help with this campaign in a couple ways. The first way is to adhere to the promise that you will never ask students or employees to provide personal information by email. The second way is to help us spread the word. IT has posters, table tents and PowerPoint slides in a variety of designs to communicate the message. If you have bulletin board space, a computer monitor that displays public announcements, or some other channel of communication, and you would like campaign materials, let us know.

So, today I’m giving readers of the IT Community blog an opportunity to get the ball rolling. Here’s the assignment:

In the discussion area below, complete this sentence:

We could improve [fill in the blank] by [fill in the blank].

An example to get things started:

We could improve IT communications by following the lead of HR director Betsy Hawkins in engaging stakeholders in conversations about policy changes and new initiatives, and then creating and executing detailed communication plans.

Feel free to submit more than one idea. It can be about anything the University does. If you have ideas but don’t want to post publicly, send me an email and I’ll share your ideas anonymously.

Gettysburg College, Iowa State, the University of Arizona and the Pennsylvania College of Technology all shared how they allow parents to access academic and financial records-FERPA-protected information-specific to their son or daughter.

These campuses handle parent (or guest) account creation in different ways. Some allow the parent to request an account and connect that account to a registered student. Others require the student to create and manage their own guest accounts.

While account creation mechanisms differ, all of these campuses deal with FERPA -protected information the same way. The student has control through a web interface to choose what data the parent account can access.

Gettysburg College built its web portal 10 years ago and has been a thought leader in portal develoment. You can visit their parent portal information page at http://public.gettysburg.edu/it/cnav/parents.htm.

Green Daily goes on to say that by the year 2010, 20% of every American’s electricity bill will go towards paying for this wasted energy.  Let’s see, if I could pay 20 percent less to the power company, I might be able to afford that trip to Finland next year to see those relatives I’ve never met, but number into the hundreds. And Finland is an expensive place to visit.

So by all means, turn off those computers and monitors when you leave work (unless they are University servers: Don’t touch that switch!). Turn off anything that has an LED light still glowing and isnt’ being used except for a little bit each day. Or even better, unplug the device completely if the glowing eye won’t shut off. It actually takes less energy to start them up again next morning than leaving them on all night in “Sleep Mode”.

But there is debate about how much to shut off and if it takes too long to catch up to all those updates that take place on Tuesday night/Wednesday morning. But first thing, turn it on and go get a cuppa joe or catch up with your buds and before you know it, your machine will be ready to tackle the day.

I’ve been doing a little of both lately as I’ve been talking to people around campus about how we should be using technology to communicate effectively. I look at our current state of campus electronic communication — primarily email spam and less-than-stellar websites — and I ask why. And I dream of things that could be — sophisticated targeted messaging, flawless search results, subscription-based and community-generated content, control given to the people we serve — and I ask why not.

Technological change is relentless. It won’t be slowing down anytime soon. We will adapt and thrive when we let ourselves dream of things that never were and ask why not.

Other definitions of spam use the words unwelcome, inappropriate and junk.

I recently wrote about the daily barrage of spam hitting campus from the outside. But what about spam from within? Can email from a campus colleague be perceived as indiscriminate, unsolicited, unwelcome, inappropriate, reviled junk?

I presume your answer is yes.

Which begs two questions: 1) Why would a campus department engage in a practice that invites scorn? And, 2) if not bulk electronic messaging, how does a campus department effectively and inexpensively communicate its offerings and events?

Why do we do it?

One reason we spam each other is obvious:  sending thousands of identical electronic messages is easy, and it doesn’t cost the sender a dime. Other reasons: The sender sincerely believes that every single recipient wants and needs to hear his or her message. The productivity output looks great (”I got our message out to 15,000 people in 5 minutes!” you tell your boss). And, I suspect, most of us simply a lack the time, skill and motivation to identify an appropriate target audience, consider their needs, produce quality messages and imagine creative delivery channels.

The tragedy of spam

Spamming may be free to the sender, but the cost is steep for the University. It goes far beyond the real monetary costs of bandwidth usage and data storage. I’m talking about the abuse of people’s time, attention and trust, and the lost opportunities for future constructive communication.

When messages we receive from “the University” are consistently impersonal, irrelevant and overwhelming in numbers, we stop paying attention. All future communication is compromised. Regaining the trust and attention of our audience grows increasingly difficult.

Internal spam is a classic “tragedy of the commons” scenario. The individual department benefits in the short run by using a community resource to successfully reach 1 out of 1,000 customers, while the University suffers the long-term consequences of 999 disenchanted (and increasingly disengaged) customers out of every 1,000.

 New rules

An anti-spam policy might curb negative behavior, but such a policy would not address the bigger issue:  how do we communicate effectively with our stakeholders? We need a new awareness and appreciation for what it means to communicate effectively in the Web 2.0 world. And we need to adopt more sophisticated strategies and technical solutions.

Here are six rules that would move us in the right direction:

1. Provide a remarkable product or service. You will cultivate a passionate audience who will do much of your communication work for you. Mundane and mediocre doesn’t compete well for attention and doesn’t travel far in social and professional networks.
2. Communicate well. I mean really well. Only communicate the very most important things. Stay focused. Keep it simple. Tell compelling stories. Make people laugh or cry and they will pay attention and remember.
3. Invest money. Recognize that communication is the most important thing you do. Hire talented writers, designers, speakers and communication strategists. Be willing to pay for ad placements, quality website design, media development and professional publications. Don’t hire your nephew at minimum wage to design your website. You will get what you pay for.
4. Make your information easy to find. Make your online content is available through RSS subscription. Optimize your online search results. Participate in online social and professional networks.
5. Communicate at appropriate times and in relevant context. Amazon does this well (you just bought book “A” and they immediately (timing) let you know that you might also be interested in book “B” (relevant)). Learn to recognize when someone has taken an action that invites related communication.
6. Seek permission to communicate with people, and never abuse the privilege they have given you to interrupt them with your message. Even opt-in mailing lists can become spam if you get greedy. Provide opportunities for your audience to tell you whether your communication is effective. And listen to them.