Nonprofit Tech

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How to Send an All Staff Technical Email

I had big plans for another insightful, deep, break-down-the-walls-of-the-corporate-culture-that-diminishes-use-of-technology post today, but I think I'm gonna save it for a rainy day and write something a bit more useful, instead. I have a big nonprofit technology conference coming up this weekend, as you might, as well, and I think we should all be resting up for it. The most important skill for any IT staff person to have is the ability to communicate. All of the technical expertise in the world has little value without it, because, if you can't tell people what you're doing, what you're doing won't be well-received. And there is an art, particularly with tech, to telling people what you're doing, whether it's taking the system down for maintenance of upgrading staff from Notepad to Office 2007. Here are my five rules for crafting an technical email that even my most computer-phobic constituents will read: <ol><li>Let no acronym go unexplained. The simplest, worst mistake that techies regularly make is to tell people that "The internet will be down while we reconfigure the DHCP server" or "The database will be unavailable while we replace the SCSI backplane". Best practice is to avoid the technical details in the announcement, if possible. But if it's relevant, speak english: "In order to accommodate the growth of our staff, we need to reconfigure the server that assigns network resources to each system to allow for more connections."</li> <li>Be clear, concise and consistent in your subjects Technical messages should have easily recognizable subjects, so that staff can quickly determine relevance. If your message is titled "Technical Information", it might as well be titled "You are getting sleepy..." But, if it's titled "Network Availability" or "Database Maintenance Scheduled", your staff will quickly figure out that these are warnings that are relevant to them. Don't worry about the Orwellian aspect of announcing system downtime with a message about availability. The point here is that using the consistent phrasing will grab staff's attention far more effectively than bolding, underlining and adding red exclamation points…

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