Sending bulk communications

Sending bulk communications is a great way to save time and get information to many people in one simple action. The tips below will show you some of the different bulk communication methods that are available to you at Lancaster University.

Tips for sending bulk communications

Shared mailboxes

Shared mailboxes are widely used in organisations such as the University to help staff work together dealing with emails.

They allow specific groups of staff to monitor and send email from a common account. They also provide a public address that can be more meaningful and easily remembered than a specific person's email.

For further information on how to access and use shared mailboxes see the Shared Mailbox page. Also see guidance on effective records management.

Mailing lists

Mailing lists allow you to send email to a large number of users at the same time. They save you time as you do not have to manually input each person's email address each time you wish to send an email to a group of contacts.

They are also good for ensuring email from organisations, such as the University, is not blocked by other organisations as spam.

To discover more about the options for emailing large numbers of users at Lancaster University see our Mailing Lists service page.

Mail merge

Using mail merge, you can create a template from which you can print many personalised documents to a list of recipients from a spreadsheet or other database.

Mail merging combines a table of information, data from a spreadsheet, or Microsoft Outlook contact information with a document in Microsoft Word.

You can use mail merging to send personalised emails to many people at once and other uses include creating personalised labels for addresses or nametags, or creating certificates and letters.

Check out the ASK pages to find out how to use mail merge in Microsoft Word.

Teams announcements

If your message is important and you want it to stand out in your conversation list, you can change the conversation to an announcement.

To create an announcement

Click into the bottom box of the channel to start a new conversation.
Click the Post type button on the toolbar.
Change the new conversation option to Announcement.

Announcements across multiple Teams channels

The Post in multiple channels option creates duplicate posts in different channels. This means you only need to create one post, such as a new conversation post or announcement and then select which channels to post it to. This can save a lot of time and ensure the post consistency. People can reply to each post as normal as they are not linked in any way.

To post in multiple channels

Click into the bottom box of the channel to start a new conversation.
Click the Settings button at the top of the post
Click Post in multiple channels.
Click the plus button to select different channels, and different Teams spaces.
Tick the channels you wish to post your message to and click Update.
Complete your message/announcement.
Click Send.

@Mentions

You can use @ mentioning to get the attention of an individual, of the members of a channel or the whole team. This is especially useful within team conversations or group chats to let people know you want them to look at this post. When used, the person/team will receive notification that the message is targeted at them (as long as they haven't turned notifications off) and it will appear in the activity feed.

To @mention

When typing in a message, type @ then start to type their nameor channel you want to alert. To alert the whole team, start typing grp - this will bring up the option to select the whole Team.
Once it appears, click on their name and type the rest of your message.
Once sent, the person(s) mentioned in the @ will receive notification of the message.

Moodle announcements

Don't forget that you can also post announcements in Moodle to get the attention of different cohorts or groups of students. This can be really useful for getting a message out quickly, for example to notify students of a room change. You can also add other media such as documents or images, for example a poster advertising an event. See the Moodle announcements and other forums page for more information on the options available.

Consider volume

Think carefully about when and how to contact people before sending out a high volume of communications. Time poor staff or students can become overwhelmed with messages that might not be relevant to them. If possible, send out timely, targeted messages. These are more likely to be noticed and read carefully. This particularly applies to Moodle announcements and Teams messages, which can come from multiple groups or modules.

Case study

Georgia Turner from Accounting and Finance in LUMS describes how she streamlined the process for sending out student references. Press play or read the transcript to learn more.

View transcript

What was the initial problem that you were hoping to solve?

As a large department, Accounting and Finance receive many requests for references from current final year students and recent graduates who are applying for post-graduate study.
For several years, the department has run a system where standard letters are provided for students' references from their academic tutor and programme director. The professional services staff would create these letters by manually completing a template with students' details, on an ad-hoc basis when the reference was requested.
Creating the letters was time consuming and could take 10 minutes per letter which would add up to a significant amount of time spent on references through the year.

What steps did you take to create your solution?

We decided to create all the letters for our current final year students and recent graduates at the start of the year in one go by using a mail merge process. This meant that there was a specific letter for each student ready at the start of the year, so when a reference was requested, the letter was ready to go and simply needed to be uploaded to the university's portal.
To make this system work we follow a few steps:
1. At the start of the year, we prepare a spreadsheet for all final year students (and a separate one for graduates) - with the use of a few different LUSI reports and Excel formulas, the spreadsheet includes all relevant student details (name, degree scheme, pronouns, entry date, current year 2 average or final degree class for graduates).
2. Using template letters, we use mail merge to automatically fill in the students' details to the relevant field in the letter. This produces individual letters for each student in one long document. Using headings on Word, we can then save these letters as individual word files which are automatically saved as the students' name and ID number.

Were there any lessons learned along the way?

The main lesson we learned was that it is worth spending more time setting up all the letters at the start of the year, to then save lots of time later on. We also found that we can use this process for other similar tasks, such as producing certificates for students who participated in certain activities in the department.

Please describe the impact that was achieved as a result of implementing the solution.

The new system has saved approximately 10 minutes per reference letter, and the usual turnaround time for references to be provided after they are requested has reduced from 3 weeks to 1 week during busy periods and even less time at quieter periods.