Why send an email to my community?

Sending emails can be useful in many situations. Below are some concrete examples.

Complete the conversation loop

By conducting a consultation with your community, you have started a conversation about a topic that interests them. Once the consultation is complete, your community can view the results in the dedicated section on your platform.

However, few people think to follow up on a consultation, and participants may feel that their contribution was useless. In some cases, people develop a certain fatigue with consultations. One way to counter this phenomenon is to show your community that their participation was useful and valued: complete the conservation loop!

Use the list of participants to the consultation to share the final consultation report or the actions/decisions that resulted from the consultation. Show them that the consultation helped move your project forward!

Use the community list to periodically send an email to all participants on your platform to share the results or impact of your consultations in decision-making processes.

Invite to participate again

When someone in your community participates in a consultation, there is a good chance that they will be interested in other consultations that you publish on your platform. You can use the community list to send a periodic email inviting them to participate again in a consultation that is available on your platform. Combine this message with messages that allow you to close the loop. You may be able to increase your participation rate!

When you publish an idea wall, you accept proposals from your community. It's exciting to see the ideas emerge! However, someone who comes at a specific time to vote or write an idea will not necessarily think to come back to see the new ideas that will be added following their participation. Use the list of participants to invite people who have already expressed their opinion to visit your idea wall again to vote on new proposals! Tip: you can remove the option to add a proposal for the last week in order to compile votes only.

One last example to fuel your thinking: invite online participants to an in-person meeting. Online questionnaires receive 2 to 10 times more participants than in-person meetings. If, as part of your consultation process, you are planning an in-person meeting to present the results or future plans, use the list of participants to invite everyone to this final meeting.

The purpose of sending emails is to keep your community informed. You need to strike a balance between sending appropriate emails and information overload. This is the main reason for limiting email sending to your platform administrators. If you have editors and they want to send an email to the list of participants in their consultation, they must submit the text to an administrator so that they can send the email on their behalf.