Email may not be the most effective tool to communicate. Many get an abundance of messages each day and therefore emails get ignored or fall of the page. When I get a ticket about creating a contact group I ask what will be communicated and why are you sending it because that matters. Here are our options:
Personal Contact lists in Google Mail
Great for small groups and committee work. But if you have more than a handful that you need to communicate with, setting up a Personal Contact Group might not be worth your time because you have to search for each individual, click on the 3-dots and select the Label you want to add them to.
While you can share your contacts, you cannot share personal contact lists. It’s all or nothing.
If you want to copy and paste a list of names from a spreadsheet, use a Google Group.
A Google Group is a single email address that disperses a message to many. You have to request these. You can designate others to manage the group and that way sending announcements will not be all on your shoulders. You can set it up so that members can email the group like a listserv or restrict it so that only Managers can email the group.
You can also share Google Drive files with the group and invite the group to meetings via Google Calendar. Adding a new member will give them access to files and future meetings.
If you are intending to email students for your department however, you may want a Blackboard Organization.
Works great for keeping students of majors/minors abreast of what is going on in the department. You can use it to send announcements or as a one-stop-shopping site for documents and forms. Best of all when a student enrolls or drops the major/minor they will be added or removed the next day.
Create a free-flowing dialogue with your team as well as sharing documents and links using Yammer groups. Group members have to option to opt-out of receiving notifications.
Faculty and staff may send out official-looking announcements to the all or some of the campus community or to a list of campus individuals with our Broadcast email system. This will help prevent your message from automatically going to spam.
It can be used as a Blog or a static site. If we focus on the Blog page (this page you are looking one such page), down at the bottom you will see the ability to give your 2 cents in the form of a comment. Additionally, you will see a subscribe button to get new posts (it’s your choice unlike emails that pile on in your inbox).
It’s like Slack! You can create chat rooms for your team to have on going collaboration.