Re: Mass E-mail to Students, Staff, and Faculty

[Barbara Ann Torney <bt42 () COLUMBIA EDU>]

We also use listservs (Lyris) created from our ERP.  Those for employees
and the main ones for students are uni-driectional, and are used only for
announcements.  The administrators of the lists (the only ones allowed to
send to them) are limited to the offices concerned with those populations.
Lists organized by major are administered by the academic departments, and
college-wide lists belong to central administrative offices.

In general, if an academic program wants to mail to all students, they
have to go through the Provost's office, who will send it out.  For
student groups, only the Student Senate can mail to all students.  other
student groups go through Student Activities, which generally incorporates
their announcements into their weekly email to all students.

Employee lists are also available to the relevant unions or professional
organization, and the faculty list is open to all faculty to send, but
very few administrators.

I bet we have a policy somewhere, but I think it deals more with what
kinds of things can be sent out (nothing for profit, etc., etc.).  We
really control things mostly by restricting who can send to the lists.

We are looking to implement a "message center" function within our portal
that will allow people to sign up for various kinds of announcements in
addition to the official ones (personal classified, certain kinds of
events, etc.), and we expect to move many of the things that currently go
out through email lists to the portal.  Since receiving these channels
will be voluntary, we do not expect to obsess so much about who can send
what in this arena.

Regards, bat

PS - We are a fairly small graduate school, so it's probably easier for us
to make restrictions without causing a bottleneck or getting too complex.

On Wed, 3 Feb 2010, Kenneth Arnold wrote:

> We have various listservs set up to send information to faculty, staff,
> faculty/staff, adjuncts,all students, freshmen, sophomores,juniors,senior,
> graduate students, etc.  Only certain people are allowed to send to these
> listservs.  General announcements to everyone are sent out from our
> Communications/Marketing office with their approval.
>
> We also send emails to select groups of people that are not covered by the
> listservs.  Central IT selects the people for the mass email from our
> administrative system based on the requirements of the mass email and sends
> them out.
>
> Jay Graham wrote:
> > Folks,
> >
> > I know this is not exactly a security topic, but does have security
> > implications. We are still getting pressure from University
> > organizations to use email as a medium to contact Faculty, Students, and
> > Staff.  We have sort of a defacto policy in place that requires approval
> > from an executive office before we allow it.
> >
> > A copuple of questions I have are:
> >
> > 1. Does your school allow the use of Mass e-mail?
> >
> > 2. Do you require approval and from whom?
> >
> > 3. Do you have a tool that the requester(s) can use to send it
> > themselves or does central IT send it for them?
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Jay Graham
> > University of Pittsburgh
>
> --
>
> Brother Kenneth Arnold
> Director of Network Systems
> Christian Brothers University
> Memphis, TN
> (901) 321-4333

 -------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Barbara Torney                                 phone: 212-678-3487
 Director, Administrative Information Services  fax:   212-678-3243
 Teachers College, Columbia University                 212-678-4048
 525 West 120 Street, Box 43                    email: bt42 () columbia edu
 New York, NY 10027                             room:  241 Horace Mann