Talking to people who are not on your payroll: members, registrants and volunteers

Almost everything written about internal communications assumes three things: that the person has a shift, that they have an email address you gave them, and that reading what you send is part of their job. With a member, a registrant or a volunteer, not one of the three holds.

The practical consequence is uncomfortable and worth accepting on day one: with these people you do not communicate by obligation, you compete for their attention with everything else on their phone. A channel that only ever gives them homework goes quiet in a month.

It is the first question any adviser asks and the one people most often skip. A member, a registrant and a volunteer gave you their details for a particular relationship, not for anything at all, and institutional communication and marketing are not the same thing even when they come out of the same place.

Which of those bases covers each of your mailings is not for us to say: that is your advisers or your data protection officer, with your own rules in front of them, and where a mailing is marketing there are the direct marketing rules the ICO enforces on top. What is plain common sense, and needs nobody to tell you, is to separate mailings by their reason, because mixing them is what turns a legitimate communication into a problem.

• The constitutional and the mandatory goes on one side: notices of meetings, rule changes, whatever the organisation has to communicate whether it likes it or not.
• The service side goes on another: training, job adverts, events, member benefits.
• Third-party marketing, if you do any, goes separately and with its own tick box. Putting it in the institutional circular contaminates the other two.
• And make it possible to stop getting the second and the third without stopping getting the first. If unsubscribing from the offers takes you out of the notice of meeting, nobody unsubscribes and everybody stops reading.

There is a part of these communications that is judged not on whether it arrived but on whether you can show it was sent and to whom. A notice of a general meeting, a change to the terms of a section, a policy the organisation has to be able to evidence it handed over.

How you are incorporated changes which rule bites. A company limited by guarantee, a registered society under the Co-operative and Community Benefit Societies Act, a registered charity and an unincorporated association are four different answers, and whether a digital mailing satisfies your own rules is for your advisers and not for us. What we can tell you is what we run into in practice, and it is the same in a co-operative, in a professional body and in a charity.

• The noticeboard in the depot and the messaging group leave no record of anything. Not of who, not of when, and not of which version of the document it was.
• Email leaves a record of the sending, not of the arrival. An email in the promotions tab counts as sent and does not count as received.
• What does work as backup is the full pair: who it went to and who opened or confirmed it, with the date and the version of the document alongside.
• And backup is not formal service. If your own rules or the statute require formal notice, that is a different thing and it still has to be done.

In a lot of charities everybody is in the same messaging group: the thirty on the payroll and the two hundred volunteers. It is convenient for the first month and it is the reason why, six months in, nobody reads anything, because one thing in ten that reaches each person is of any interest to them.

So informing volunteers is not a courtesy: it is part of what the organisation has to put in. What makes no sense is informing them of the same things as the paid staff, because they do not do the same job and are not on the same terms.

1. 01

   Separate them from day one, not when it starts to hurt

   Two different groups from the moment the channel is set up. Doing it later means reordering two hundred people one at a time, and nobody does it.

2. 02

   Employment matters do not go to volunteers

   Terms and conditions, payslips, rotas, leave, union ballots. Sending those to somebody with no contract creates confusion about their status, and that confusion sometimes ends up as a claim.

3. 03

   What does go to both, goes to both

   Data protection, the safeguarding policy, health and safety, the code of conduct, who the lead is at each site. Everything the organisation has to be able to evidence it handed over is handed over to the people who help without a contract in exactly the same way.

4. 04

   Each project with its own people

   The food bank, the clothing store and the children's project have their own coordinator, their own hours and their own place. What happens in one is no use to the other, and sending it to everybody teaches people not to open things.

5. 05

   Count on people coming and going

   Somebody helps out for three months. Setting them up and closing them down has to take two minutes and has to be doable by whoever is standing there, not by head office. If it costs more than that it stops being done, and the list fills up with people who no longer come.

They are the two channels you already have, and the two of them fail for different reasons that are worth not confusing, because the fix for one does not fix the other.

• The personal email address fails on delivery: it goes to promotions, the address goes stale when the person changes job, and there is no way of knowing whether it arrived.
• The messaging group fails on noise: two hundred people, anybody can reply to everybody, and two hours later the important thing is twelve messages back.
• And it fails on data: a group with two hundred numbers in it leaves each person's personal mobile on show to the other hundred and ninety-nine, who were not given it for that.
• And both fail for the same reason on top of that: they do not distinguish. Everything arrives equally loudly, so three weeks in everything arrives equally quietly.

What works with these people is not a louder channel, it is one where each thing weighs what it weighs: what you only need to know, what you have to confirm, and what only concerns one section. And where getting in does not depend on having an email address from the organisation, because they do not have one and are not going to.

With paid staff, measuring reach can be explained and gets accepted. With a member or a volunteer, told badly, it sounds like the organisation keeping an eye on the people who help it for nothing. The number is the same; what changes is what you say it is for.

• Measure the mailing, not the person. Sixty-two per cent of members opened the notice tells you whether it needs sending again; the name of whoever did not open it tells you nothing you can use.
• The exception is anything that has to be on the record. There you do need to know who confirmed and who did not, because that is precisely the point, and it is worth saying so in the document itself.
• Say it before you start and say it in writing: what gets recorded, who sees it and what for. In a general meeting, a dashboard that turns up unannounced becomes the item on the agenda.
• And do not compare sections or sites with each other in public. Compare each one with itself, which is the only comparison that says anything.