Faculty/Staff General Email Guidelines

Purpose

The purpose of these guidelines is to establish best practices for the use of South Texas College general emails, which are disseminated to all faculty and staff of the collegewide community.

Justification

Faculty/staff general emails are important for academic and administrative communications but they are not the only, nor are they always the best tool. These guidelines are intended to:

• Provide faculty/staff general emails at South Texas College that are accessible, concise, consistent and coordinated.
• Establish guidelines for the appropriate use of faculty/staff general emails versus other communication tools, e.g., STC News, Events Calendar, Digital Signage, and Social Media.
• Manage the number of emails sent to faculty and staff.
• Preserve the effectiveness of general email as a communication tool for the collegewide community.

Essential Communications

Message that meet at least one of the following criteria may be classified as essential information.

• The message is essential to the mission or operations of the college.
• The message is essential for student academic performance.
• The message pertains to an urgent health or safety situation.
• The message is required by law.

Suitable Topics/Subjects

South Texas College faculty and staff have identified the following email topics as most relevant, ranked by importance:

1. Security alerts
2. Campus closings and other college operations
3. Notices from Human Resources
4. Professional Development opportunities from the Teaching & Learning Center
5. Service notifications from Information Technology
6. Notices from Business Office
7. Admissions, Enrollment & Financial Aid
8. Wellness information, such as flu shots and health benefits

Guidelines for Faculty/Staff Emails

Sender Email: The sender must use an employee email address (southtexascollege.edu) or another domain owned by the college. Emails from a student account, personal account or account not owned by the college will not be accepted.

Contact Info: The text of the email must include contact information for the person, office or group that sent it. Minimally, the contact information must include a phone number and a valid STC email address.

Message Length: The message must include a relevant subject line and the body must be clear, concise and no longer than 500 words in length. Additional information, if needed, could be provided via a web link in the text.

Message Formatting: The message must be text-based and web accessible. Because recipients with disabilities may rely on text-to-speech or other software to read your message, all information conveyed by the message must be included as text, and not solely in images or screenshots of a document. To learn more about accessibility visit STC's Accessibility website.

Repeat Delivery: If messages need to be sent more than once, resend to the general address again for each delivery. Repeated emails will not be sent both in the morning and in the afternoon.

Attachments: Attachments should be under 2MB file size.

Replies/Responses: Our staff does not reply/forward any emails responding back to faculty/staff general emails.

Events: Faculty/Staff general emails are not intended to promote events. Instead, please submit your event to be added to the online Events Calendar.

What to avoid: Delivery of an email could be denied for any of the following reasons:

• Improper logo usage or unapproved logos.
• Spelling or grammatical errors.
• Unlicensed stock images, images found by web search or copied without permission.
• If message is not “email ready”. Received messages should not require editing.
• Overuse or oversaturation from sender from same area or department.