Module 2 Lists Task

As a convenient coincidence for the Email Lists Task I was asked by my boss at work to design a Christmas card and a little video for emailing out to our students, clients and associates. The image I produced is there at the left and the video was a 10 second 400kb .mov file. So when I found out that they wanted to send the file to 350 recipients from the Office Manager outlook account I started to have some concerns. 350 X 500kb equals a whole host of problems.

As we are an educational institution we have access to the fantastic resources at Edna one of which is Edna Lists. I applied for and set up an email list some time ago and it had been lying dormant ever since. So I put two and two together and the result was a nice shiny email list with 350 emails addresses in it. I have to say I am indebted to the fabulous Kerry Johnson who I am lucky enough to have in my PLN as my Edna expert. I sent out a tweet for help and she responded with her phone number!! Now that's customer service eh.

The email list software interface (is that the right terminology?) that Edna uses for their lists is Lyris and so far it has been a snap to use. At this point in time the email list will only be used for sending information emails about BJ's Australia but there is the possibility we will use it more as a two way communication tool. I really liked the analysis email I received in my inbox a few hours after we sent out the email message. It provided me with excellent information about the delivery successes and failures.

Screenshot of Edna Lists in action.

So for this task I am going to answer the questions with my experiences of today and my work use of email lists firmly in the forefront of my thoughts.

What are the pros and cons of email lists versus discussion boards?
Are there certain kinds of communication or purposes more suited to one than the other?
For our needs there is no question, a discussion board simply would not have provided the services we needed. We needed a speedy way to get the Christmas Message out. We did not need to have a bunch of folks discussing the whys and wherefores of Christmas. This was a unidirectional connection with a single short term purpose and a secondary but no less important opportunity for us to create a legacy for easy communication with our network.

Of course there are pros (here is a link to the Lyris product tour) and cons for email lists. And of course you can all find good reasons not to use Discussion Boards like this and well our course discussion board is a prime example of an extremely useful discussion board.

For me this experience has also opened up a whole new can of worms and I'm sure there will be plenty of people dead against the way I have used email lists today. There is no question however that for the BJ's , this use of email lists is exactly what we needed.