As the communications coordinator at my organization, I handle many of the marketing and informational emails that are delivered to clients’ inboxes daily. Some days are busier than others, and over the years the volume has really started to add up.
Rather than sending emails out with no reflection on the work I have done, I began keeping track of the emails I send out on behalf of our various teams and departments. I organize these in an analysis document, which allows me to gain a great deal of insight into our ongoing communications strategy. The document allows me to track things including which email topics were sent out on what day, how many emails were sent out within a specific week/month/quarter, and how many emails were requested by a specific team or department.
It’s a process that I revisit once per quarter, and it allows us to determine any ongoing trends. We can see high-volume periods year-over-year and can coordinate email campaigns around these to try and avoid overloading the inboxes of clients. In the case of emails that see annual iterations, such as invitations to conferences, we can plan ahead for the details of these and have a general design prepared at an earlier date. This system also allows us to more easily reference when an email was last sent, should we need to follow up on the info therein or create a new communication with similar content—our LegaSuite upgrade announcements, for example, only come around every few years.
Perhaps your credit union hosted a promotional event to try and encourage new signups for credit cards last year and you’d like to revisit that initiative. While it’s always good to avoid recycling previous work verbatim, having the option to easily reference a previous communication can significantly trim the required work time. Maybe your records indicate a period during a specific month that was light on emails to members—are there additional services you could promote during that period the following calendar year?
This line of thinking doesn’t have to apply exclusively to communications. If you are looking to keep your reference materials or technical documents up to date, the simple note of when the previous updates were performed (maybe located in the footer or at the end of the document) can save you time from cross-referencing several items in your folders.
When was the last time you updated booklets or fliers at your branch? Are the details of products and services listed within these paper copies accurate to their latest iterations? Taking a bit of extra time every so often to examine items that may not be as high on your list of priorities can go a long way in benefiting not only your credit union staff but your members as well.
Of course, there’s no need to try and overhaul all of these items at once. But it may be worth taking a look into current procedures to see if there are areas where additional analysis and record keeping could benefit your credit union in the long-term.
