Is email dead?

An interesting article from the BBC:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/business-15856116

Lee Bryant is co-founder of Headshift, the world's biggest social business consultancy. He believes email's dominance over business communications is coming to an end.
"When email was first developed it was an excellent point-to-point communication tool when nothing else existed," says Mr Bryant.
"I think we've reached the stage where email as means of communicating is overloaded. I think we will see what happens on email today transitioning towards various kinds of both internal and consumer facing social tools."

The line in bold is the main issue that I currently see with email. In my work we have members who definitely want to receive newsletters by email but never read them (we closely track this to monitor our communication effectiveness).

People feel that their in-boxes have become overloaded. The email inbox has become the to-do list that anybody can add to. Google have addressed this through their priority inbox feature in Gmail, but it only works via their web interface and it does not seem to learn what should be given priority. Using a system like this also means accepting that not every email will be replied to. Having returned from a few days away to 130 emails at work I found that about 30 were internal practical issues that could be deleted as they had passed; about 50 were forwarded information from people and the other 50 were people looking for decisions from me or to arrange meetings. If the 50 people passing me information had not got into a priority inbox then I might have not responded to them or actioned what needed done. One of them was about funding for a new project and it would have been very bad form to not have acted on the copied in email.

The issue of spam seems to be lessening as time goes on. I have had the same personal email address for 13 years and I get about 230 spams a month filtered out by gmail (I forward my email from my web hosts servers to a gmail account so it synchronises with my android phone and iPad). I get about one spam per week hitting my inbox. Three years ago i was getting 1200 spams filtered out per month and was struggling to keep on top of it all. However, not everyone is as savvy at spam filtering and I know many people who are overwhelmed with spam. Moving to a closed system like Facebook, where you only receive emails from known friends solves this problem, but means that outsiders can't contact you. Previous attempts at applying this to email accounts has meant people not being contactable at all even when they have written their email address on a form as contact details.

I don't know what the answer to these email problems is, but the current system is not working adequately as a communication tool.


Update 7th December 2011

An article on a similar them from the BBC
Thierry Breton caused a sensation last week when he told an interviewer that he planned to ban internal email at the information technology services giant, Atos.

I am reminded of the saying that "the email inbox is the to-do list that anyone can add to".

The Apple of Web Hosting

Sitting here typing on my iPad I am forcefully made aware of what makes Apple products so successful - they work as expected and provide a great user experience. This is primarily because, unlike windows, Apple are able to control the hardware platform and ensure that all the software will run on it. They also put a lot of work into the user interfaces - making them simple to use, intuitive (usually) and replicating the same style across different devices. This got me thinking about why there is no web hosting service that achieves these objectives. I think one of the reasons is that, like Microsoft, web hosts can't control what software is being run on their platform. If they did there would be a huge fall out from customers. In fact, in the world of shared web hosting customers really want the same privileges as a root user without having to be concerned about the effects their activities have on other customers. Then there is the issue of user interfaces - usually designed by engineers or developers and rarely simple to follow.

Here is what I think would need to happen in order for a web hosting service to give the same end user experience as an apple product:

- Each user needs to be on a virtual machine so they can't affect any other customers access to the system.
- This needs to be cloud based with continuous back up.
- The host needs to supply and update all the scripts permitted on the system - possibly charging for each one in the way apps are charged for on ios devices.
- The user interfaces need to be stripped down to a very simple front end. I had some experience of doing this with cPanel and it worked quite well at reducing customer support enquiries.
- Faults need to be fixed proactively so that users rarely see them.

At the same time customers will need to become used to paying a bit more for hosting. I don't think it's possible to run a viable service like this for less than £10 a month, £15 if it involves multiple domains.

If somebody did set up such a service and aimed it at people looking for reliable simple hosting I think it could make money. Whether it would ever get enough traction to become the Apple of web hosting is another question entirely.

SCVO Increasing Membership fees

I see that the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations is proposing to increase its membership fees from between 8 and 20%. There is still a free membership for organisations with a turnover of less than £25,000. Other fees will range from £135 to £600 per year. This needs to be decided by the AGM on 23rd November.

An organisation with a turnover of under £50,000 and one employee will typically pay £135. An organisation with a turnover of more than £5 million will pay £600. This hardly seems a fair relationship of fees to size. Presumably SCVO doesn't want to risk bigger players leaving if their fees are proportionate with size. Also, when the average pay increase this year in the voluntary sector has been 0% and grants are frozen or being removed an increase in fees is somewhat shocking.

In my view they should be restricting increases to no more than the rate of inflation, or better still no more than the average increase in statutory sector grants and pay awards. Then they should start a five year fees escalator with larger organisations gradually paying fees proportionate to their size.

[Please file under: "friends, how not to make them or influence people".]

Should you send mass mailing appeals to trusts?

This is a question that gets asked rather a lot by people new to fundraising.

The perceived wisdom is:
Don't do it. Tailor all the applications seperately.

The real world situation is:
You will probably find that when you start off you are tailoring each one till you get to five or six then you will find that number seven or eight are actually the same as number one or three i.e. for 100 applications you will probably have less than ten variations. This means the process speeds up as you go through them. In fact you can group them together into ones that are very similar.

Having said this, I never send them out en masse. I do a few a day and post them out as they are done. I also personalise them slightly with PS's of highly relevant or connected issues, and I always top and tail with a fountain pen.

I just think that the idea that you would ever do 100 completely different applications because there were 100 trusts to apply to for the same project is a bit misleading. I don't think anybody would write fresh applications to each of them.

In my experience as a fundraiser appeals to smaller trusts brought in about 10% of my fundraising target so it was worthwhile, buit not worth spending any more than 10% of my time on.

The changing use of the Internet

According to the latest Google Benchmarking report, people's usage of web sites has reduced slightly over the past year:

Click on image for larger version.

Am I reading this correctly? It appears that The depth of visits to web sites is decreasing, as is the time spent on any one page.