Senator Andrew Bartlett
Sunday, January 02, 2005
 
Getting your emails noticed
It probably demonstrates that I have completely lost the ability to have fun, but Ive spent some time during the last week or so trying to catch up on my emails, which have a bad habit of building up over time.

I continue to receive a lot on the refugee issue and the deportation of the Bhaktyari family. Not surprisingly there is not a lot on the tsunami. There is little someone in my position can do at this stage other than support the Governments efforts and encourage everyone to donate money to help. Nations will need to give more down the track, but the big time for community donations is now.

Whenever I trawl back through an email build-up, it becomes pretty obvious that some emails are far more likely to get noticed than others. So here's a couple of tips which are probably already blindingly obvious to anyone who reads things like this Blog.

Every politician is different and so are the most effective ways in getting then to pay attention to an email message. I know some who try to answer all their own emails, and others who barely look at them. However, there are two things which I think would be constant for all MPs.

Firstly, an email that looks like it has been sent to every MP is of far less weight than one that appears to be directed personally, particularly if it is clear the sender is not from your electorate. An email sent to 225 MPs will inevitably be left to the few MPs who believe it has direct relevance to their areas of responsibility (either constituent or policy portfolio).

Secondly an even more certain way to guarantee being ignored is to over-email. I can only thank the program designer for the feature which allows auto-deletions from certain addresses. Having just checked my (very full) deleted items file, there is one person who in the last two months has sent me over 300 emails on every topic under the sun (judging by the subject headings).

There may well be the solution to achieving world peace in amongst these (actually there probably isn’t) but the reality is it's never going to be read by anyone.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Sunday, January 02, 2005 Permalink
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