Before you launch into your first interaction, you should have enough people in your database to make it useful. Try to imagine how many responses would be ideal, and then consider that many people will not respond. The Spokesman-Review typically sends out queries to 200 or 300 people at a time.
E-mail Math
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it takes 20 responses to get six good ones. And only 10 percent of your e-mail correspondents respond in a timely manner. That means you’d have to send e-mail to 200 people to come up with six comments or other input that you can use.
A List of DO’s
- Make sure that the e-mail addresses of recipients are placed on the Bcc (blind carbon copy) line of the e-mail so that you won’t expose your list of e-mail addresses to everyone who receives the message. (See breakout for detail on how to set up Bcc.)
- Be careful about what you put in the subject line. People are especially suspicious and may not open the e-mail message if they don’t recognize the name of the sender or if the subject line is not clear. The subject line must be short and succinct, and should give some indication that this is a “local” issue. (See sample subject lines in next section.)
- Be very clear about what you plan to do with the responses. Tell them if you plan to publish their remarks, or if you will first call them before publishing their comments, or whether their comments may be included in an overall wrap-up. This is new and different for some people and you don’t want anyone to be surprised by their words being published.
- Keep track of the e-mail responses you get back.
- Make sure to send each of them a follow-up message thanking them for their response, reminding them again that their comments may be published (and ask them again for their name if they left it off the first time). If possible, tell them definitively whether their comments will be included in the story or whether “a representative sampling of the comments we received” will be published.
- Include an “opt-out” line at the end so that people can ask to be removed from the list. Here’s an example: “P.S.: We occasionally ask people for their input by e-mail. If you’d rather not hear from us, let me know.”
A List of DON’Ts
- Send e-mail to anyone more often than once a week. More than once a week, and people will consider it spam and will ask to be removed. If you have multiple staff members using the database, this becomes an issue to consider when devising the database. One field in the database table should be for a date stamp, which indicates when each person was last sent e-mail. The queries you build should exclude people who’ve already been sent e-mail within the past week.
- Choose topics unless they have great public interest. No amount of prodding will make people interested in inherently boring topics.
- Suggest any sort of slant in the phrasing of your question. People will react negatively to any perceived bias.