Please protect email addresses as you would phone numbers -- unlisted phone numbers.
BCC stands for "Blind Carbon Copy." Historically, it would indicate who had received (or should receive) a copy of a memo without being listed in the "To" or "CC" fields. In the context of email, it indicates who should receive a copy of the email without being listed in the headers. If you're sending email to a number of people who do not (or should not) know each other, it is courteous to conceal their email addresses by using BCC.
Many people are protective of their email addresses. They don't care to receive email from random people on the net. Perhaps you've decided your favorite joke, worthy cause, or business announcement was worth sending to them. You've also sent their email address to everyone else on the mailing.
Look at it another way, would you send your entire holiday card list out with each card you sent? Of course, some people would not like getting the list and others would not appreciate being on the list being sent everyone.
And if you're in business, would you think of giving away your contact list? That's what you're doing by including everyone in the To or CC fields. And some recipients of your mailing might consider everyone else on your list interested in similar mailings and feel free to use the list themselves.
Viruses and spam-bots are now designed to go through mail files and address books looking for potential addresses. Sending a single message individually addressed to a large list of people increases the chances that they all will be spammed or sent a virus should any one of them get infected.
Out of respect for your recipients, would you please consider not listing them each individually in your mailings?
If your "mailing list" is personal, you can just use BCC for all the names. (You can send it To yourself.) If it's a more business oriented list, why not make it an official mailing list at your site and use the alias rather than including everyone's name and email address in the headers?
Interestingly, not using BCC when sending email to a large group who don't know each other appears to be against Google's GMail Program Policies. They list as one of the prohibited actions, "selling, exchanging or distributing to a third party the email addresses of any person without such person's knowing and continued consent to such disclosure."
Article from Rutgers.edu
Outlook Notes can be a great way to manage miscellaneous lists.
Creating a Note in Outlook is easy. The Quick-Key method is CTRL-SHIFT-N. Then, type your note and close it by clicking the “X” in the upper right hand corner of the window.
When using Notes in Outlook, keep in mind that the first line of the note becomes the title. For example, if I want to create a note for books that I want to read, the first line of my note is “Books to Read”. Subsequent entries in that note are the names of the books I want to read.
Here's an example of some note categories:
It doesn't take much time to create or maintain notes, but it's handy to have them all in one place when you need to jot a quick thought.
{Graphic of EFE Resources page}
Obviously there is a wealth of great information available online that we want to share with our site visitors. However, in an environment that results in people quickly scanning copy instead of slowly reading, it helps to use some short de
Create a Table
Sometimes using Schoolwires I find that my text can shift when I save my page, and paragraph spacing can mysteriously disappear, hence I work in tables quite often.
For this link page I created a one-column table set at 90% width, with 20px cell spacing to add a fixed white space below each cell of content.
Using Images
Graphics don't just make things "look pretty". They help draw the eye in and focus on the words. I like to create images at 100% size to guarantee a crisp image. The graphic icons in this example are left-aligned. I used Image Properties to set 8px of spacing on the right-hand side so text wouldn't bump up too closely to my graphic.
Why Rounded Corners?
Rounded corners and curved lines are softer and break up the straight lines of text and paragraphs. As a designer, I've seen the trend to use softer lines and curves in other industries as well - even in the grocery store you'll see evidence of this from coffee creamer containers to shampoo and fabric softener bottles.
Link Images
For this link resource page, I visited each site, made a screen shot of their main page and cropped it in Photoshop. I wanted our site visitors to have something that would instantly identify and individualize each resource.
The Final Touch
Besides adding the "Web Site" text link at the bottom of each text block, I made sure to link the graphics as well, knowing that most people are used to clickable images.
Visit the Schoolwires blog to find out about some exciting table enhancements coming in Centricity 2!
Posted by Anne Goodrich at 11:25 AM
3/1/2010
Learning From the Fall of Newspapers
{newspaper graphic} A couple of months ago the Rocky Mountain News, a journalism institution, published its last print newspaper. At the end of the day, its presses, working tirelessly since April 23, 1859, went silent.
It was a telling moment for the newspaper industry, which continues to try and save its print publications while making up lost ground in the online publishing arena. Readers, it seems, have sent the message that they are increasingly turning to online sources. A Pew Research Center study found online readership spiked close to 10 percent in just two yeas from 2006-08 - to satisfy readers' information needs.
Web 2.0 readers value the immediacy, convenience and variety of content on the Web and they appreciate tha tmuch of what they choose to read is free.
What can school districts learn from this?
Districts that are creative in their use of new media and print will likely find they are able to disseminate information, drive home their overriding messages and themes and draw attention to their best programs, teachers and students.
If you're writing a story or the equivalent of a press release to publish on the Web or send out via e-mail, you should think of ways to make the experience interactive. Are there links that can help illustrate your main points? Are there articles, charts or audio/video files that could make your piece stronger? Is there a way to allow feedback and encourage discussion? (This could be tricky since the comments will likely have to be monitored.)
What may ultimately sway schools to lean toward electronic publishing could end up being something very simple: It can be done cheaply. A communication professional with a decentunderstanding of Web publishing programs can essentially eliminate a huge portion of a district's printing costs.
The print vs Web answer may lie somewhere in-between. Some districts will likely turn to the Web for their day-to-day communications (or minute-to-minute in the cases of the many schools already Twittering*) and use their print publications to delve deeper into school issues than they ever could before.
From an article by Greg Dimeris and Michael Piper, NSPRA.org
Posted by Anne Goodrich at 9:00 AM
