I think (8.4 percent) is low
said Dean of Students Ryan Lombardi. ... You've got to do more than just e-mail. With e-mail you're only hitting a fraction of the population. During an era of vast social media usage, few college students read e-mails sent by Ohio University, causing the school to get creative with how it communicates.
During the past year, an average of only 8.4 percent of students open e-mails sent by OU through a program called Constant Contact, according to OU data. Comparatively, 37.75 percent of parents on average open e-mails sent through the same program.
Of those 70 e-mails, 34 were sent to students and 36 were sent to parents, according to the data. OU sends messages with pictures and links through the Constant Contact program, which tracks the open rate of e-mails. Messages with plain text, which comprise the majority of e-mails OU sends, are sent through the Office of Information Technology.
For students
I think (8.4 percent) is low
said Dean of Students Ryan Lombardi. ... You've got to do more than just e-mail. With e-mail
you're only hitting a fraction of the population.
In addition to e-mail, university officials use the OU website, signs in residence halls, television screens in Baker University Center, and Twitter and Facebook to communicate with students.
With all the media available to students today
it's going to take a combination of things (to communicate)
said Kent Smith, vice president for Student Affairs. What we now know from students is that e-mail is not the number-one way they communicate nowadays ... I think that we have a responsibility as administrators to meet students where they are and try multiple means of communicating.
Smith launched a blog Wednesday on OU's website as another avenue of communicating with students.
Even with all of those (methods)
you won't hit 100 percent of the students
Smith said. I think the other thing that complicates it is that today's student is being hit with so much contact ... When they open their e-mail they're thinking
'What can I delete? What is not worth my time?'
While more students tend to open e-mails in the health and safety category - 12.3 percent on average - most students ignore OU's Today in Compass e-mail newsletters. An average of only 5.98 percent of students opened those e-mails during the past year, compared to 28.8 percent of parents. The lowest average open rate for a single e-mail for students was in the newsletter category, at 4.3 percent.
Overall, the parent open rate has been 29.4 percentage points higher than the student rate during the past year. The highest average open rate for a single e-mail for parents - 52.7 percent - is in the health and safety category.
I think (the e-mails) have been very effective with parents
