TOPIC:

Our club sees a lot of role changes as a meeting approaches. The Role Change email notifications are extremely valuable to us in managing the meeting.

I'd like to propose two enhancements to the notifications: subject line and notification contents.

SUBJECT LINE

First is the contents of the subject line. Here's a recent subject I received:

[WST] Watertown Saturday Toastmasters Meeting Notification: Role Change for 2018-12-29 Meeting

I realize the usefulness of mentioning the club name, but all of our officers lead only one club. The "[WST]" email prefix serves the purpose of identifying the club. I realize that won't help clubs with multi-club officers who don't have an email prefix. And we've compounded the problem with a long club name.

All of the notifications for a meeting have the same subject line. In an email overview list, they all look the same. I'm imagining something like:

[WST] 12-29 Colleen Smith added Speaker #1

This is just one idea – I'd love to see others' input on the most useful subject line for most clubs.

A short line with notification details would be much more revealing, even in a mobile email client. Each notification subject line would be different.

The subjects of Opt-In emails reveal a lot, which is great example that's easy to use in mobile email clients:

[WST] Jay Jones Approved their Addition to Watertown Saturday Toastmasters Website

NOTIFICATION CONTENT

After opening a notification email, most of the content is the same in all notifications. The useful nugget is somewhere in the middle of the email:

Colleen Smith has added his/herself from the following role: Speaker #1

Could that nugget be positioned at the top of the email? The specifics of the change would be easier to spot — and in email clients that display the start of the contents, you might even see the details you need without opening the email.

I am not really that keen on changing this.

It seems that you are asking me to change a feature used by *many* clubs to satisfy a consideration of your club, because you are using a long club name. What about all the clubs that like it the way it is?

I specifically designed this so that recipients would open the email. If you open the email, you can access the relevant agenda, you can reply to the email, and you can confirm that the email is likely authentic.

I didn't realize that it was designed so that recipients would open the email. Thanks for the clarification.

I strongly agree with shortening it by removing the club name that comes the second time. Club e-mails are already prefixed [ClubName].

My reasoning is because mail clients can only show a limited amount of the subject at a time (ESPECIALLY ON MOBILE DEVICES). When every e-mail looks like "[ClubName] Club Name Toastmasters Club Actual Subject", when people look at their inbox they may not see the "Actual Subject" that comes later on. It gets cut off. All of the e-mails from the club just show as something like "[ClubName] Club Name Toastmaste...", especially on mobile devices.

I want to see the "Actual Subject" part without having to open the e-mail to see it. Why do we have to identify the club twice at the beginning of the subject? Also, the mail's "From:" header additionally specifies the sender's name.

If the reasoning behind this is it's "designed this so that recipients would open the email" - well, let me tell you that I've worked with a variety of e-mail marketers and I've never seen any of them want to do something like this and need to specify who it's from so many times.

My problem isn't in the Role Change Notifications, but it's in other notification e-mails that do the same thing.

I would like to add my nod in favor of removing the name of the club in the subject filed in order to get to the point of the email. Especially when viewing on a mobile device and reducing the time to read an entire email for a simple notification. (I agree that you cannot easily find in the agenda where a role change has occurred.)

Since many recipients have created folders in their email program to place incoming emails from Toastmasters, a short, specific notification in the subject field would be a great benefit!

Thank you for your consideration!
Alicia
Club 845547