The following is an excerpt from a chapter in the manual 
"How to Measure Your Communication Programs" by Angela D. Sinickas 
copyright 2005 Angela D. Sinickas. All rights reserved.   ISBN 0-9661757-1-9

5

Measuring Memos, E-Mail and Phone Mail

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      Much of the print media used to share information still comes 
in the form of memoranda and letters.  And, in the last decade, 
there has been a phenomenal increase in the number of employees 
who are connected to electronic mail on their computers and to 
voice mail on their telephones.  Some companies also issue pagers 
that have the capacity to receive "written" messages scrolling across 
the display areas.  
      
Because these newer media have the capacity for mass distribution 
lists, they are sometimes being used in place of paper memos for 
greater speed of delivery.  However, just as with old-fashioned print 
distribution, just because someone sent it doesn't mean anyone at the 
other end received the intended message.  
      
Consider these situations I've experienced:
      
•  Memos to be shared with all employees in the Phoenix branch of 
  one company continued to be routed by the corporate mail room 
  to the former Phoenix general manager three months after she had 
  left that position. Every so often, branch employees packaged up 
  the unopened mail and sent it to their former general manager, 
  who had become a vice president at the corporate office -- on the 
  same floor as the mail room.  
•  Electronic mail messages were being sent out to everyone on one 
  company's computer network, but most of the salespeople, who 
  were in the office only a few hours once a week, refused to learn 
  how to use e-mail and preferred messages on voice mail.
•  The voice mail messages I had been leaving for my main contact 
  at my PR agency were not being returned by her, but by her boss, 
  because my contact had left the agency nearly a month earlier.  
  The agency had been too afraid to let me know she was gone 
  because she had been the only remaining person on the team I had 
  hired 12 months earlier. 
•  At a Midwestern university, a mailing was once addressed and 
  delivered not to the intended alumni mailing list but to Flossie, 
  Bossie, Clover and 20,000 of their bovine buddies at the 
  university's South Dairy Barn. It happened because two computer 
  data bases crossed wires. (In all fairness, this was in 1976, when 
  computers were just entering the working world.)
               
Even when the messages sent out are received by the intended 
recipients, all too often the channels used are not appropriate for 
the content.  Here are a few horror stories -- all of them perpetrated 
by managers whose jobs were in either communication or marketing:
      
•  One manager preferred to notify his staff of merit pay increases 
  through e-mail, hoping to avoid conducting performance discussions.  
•  Some consultants were notified that they were being laid off 
  through voice mail -- which they happened to check during a break 
  in a client meeting.  
•  A corporate vice president was sending very long phone mail 
  messages to field managers about key hires, with lots of detail on 
  background, starting dates, etc. -- and ended with: "Please pass 
  this on to your employees."  No written version of these messages 
  was ever sent. Nor could the managers forward the original voice 
  mail to all the employees who should have received the information 
  because very few of them were connected to voice mail.  No matter 
  how convenient the selected medium was for the senders, none of 
  these  messages was probably considered appropriately sent by 
  the receivers. 
      
This chapter provides tools for measuring the effectiveness of the 
content and the format of memos, whether they are in traditional 
print format or in e-mail or voice mail formats. It includes some 
objective measurement techniques to assess what you are sending out 
to your audience, as well as tools that ask your audience to evaluate 
what they are receiving from you. In this chapter, you will learn 
how to conduct the following types of measurements on print, 
electronic and audio memos:
      
•  Objective and self-analysis of in-boxes.
•  Volume tracking before and after a "memo mania" contest.
      
"Of course, many of the measurement techniques in the chapter 
"Measuring Publications and Audiovisuals" can also be applied to 
memos, such as content analysis, grade level testing, etc.
.(End of Excerpt)

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