Reducing the Number of Student Emails

What was the second worst-rated question on the last student satisfaction survey? "The amount of email I receive on my bastyr.edu account is manageable."

Students get a lot of email in their Bastyr email accounts, and most of it is of the "mass" variety (brown bag announcements, club meetings, clinic sub requests, etc.). We recently set up a fake student email account to see just how much. The account received about six emails a day from the "Student" email list alone. The number for real students in probably closer to 10-12 a day when considering other student email lists.

To help alleviate this email burden (which some students say is causing them to ignore their email completely), we're considering alternative ways to communicate with students. The first step is improving After Hours on MyBU to make it more user friendly and directing people to post events and announcements there first. (Notice the forums are now broken into categories, some "official" forums have been added and we now have a forum called "Today!" where announcements about the current day's events can be found.)

The hope is that by improving After Hours and pointing more people to take advantage of the "digest" options it offers (one summary email a day vs. an email for every announcement), people can "opt in" to the type of messages they want to receive and students will have a better chance of keeping up on their Bastyr mail.

We also plan to improve the internal calendar and add more options for posting announcements on MyBU. Have any other ideas for improving the way we communicate with students?
-Jordan