All-staff and all-student emails

Corporate Communications has responsibility for sending all-staff and all-student emails.

You can find all other mailing lists, and who is responsible for them, on our mailing service.

Students and staff have told us they prefer personal and targeted emails. If sent too frequently and inappropriately, bulk emails can annoy people.

Therefore all-staff and all-student emails have to meet one or more of the following criteria:

• Essential to the on-going business processes of the University
• Reporting an emergency situation
• Requested by members of the Executive Group
• The information cannot be distributed any other way within the desired timescale

 

Best practice

When preparing your email, take note of our top tips:

Subject line is key. Make sure it is engaging, while being clear, relevant and concise. Test your subject lines by either asking a colleague or student. You can also test your subject lines by experimenting with different subject lines and tracking links within the email.

Keep it short and simple. Be ruthless when identifying what’s relevant. It is better to include just the key message with a link to a webpage for more details.

Important information at the top. If you wanted staff or students to learn one thing from this email what would it be? Include that key piece of information at the top. This is likely to be a call-to-action. Make sure what you want the audience to do is clear.

Make it scannable. Use bullet points, sub-headings, short paragraphs and short sentences.

Shorten urls. Don’t include long web links in your emails. You can shorten your links in bit.ly.

Send plain text emails. Unfortunately we cannot send html emails via our all-staff or all-student mailing lists.

Sign off with contact information.

Don’t send the same email twice. Students and colleagues have complained that they’ve received the same email from multiple sources. If a colleague asks you to send an email on their behalf please check beforehand that it hasn’t already been sent to another mailing list.

 

A good example