Tips on managing a shared email account for volunteer-run non profit organisations

Non profit organisations rely on email to manage lots of things - communications with existing and potential members and volunteers, CSR partners, sponsors, donors and other stakeholders, and also regulatory agencies or local authorities.

And generally, one non-profit organisation has 1 email account. It could be a gmail, yahoo or other web-based mail account, and one of the founders or volunteers usually sets it up, creating a shared password and User ID. 

That part is simple enough, but if your organisation is a small and largely volunteer-run, it's also worth putting some thought into how best to manage the emails that come into it. 

The first point to consider is that there's likely to be more than 1 person accessing it. For example, different office bearers and volunteers might be working on different projects, yet all using the same email address. This could be tricky, as you might miss an email that you were meant to respond to, as it got lost amongst all the emails meant for other persons in that same inbox.

To pre-empt or overcome problems like these, here are some simple tips that hopefully get you on top of your inbox in no time! :-)

First, assign categories of emails. It's probably easiest to do this by "Sender", ie. Category 1 : Donors, Category 2 : Stakeholders, Category 3 : Volunteers & Members,  Category 4 : Regulatory Authorities, etc.

Next, decide which of the volunteers/office bearers will handle what, and ensure that each person knows their assigned category. For example, if you will be managing online donations and membership subscriptions, then you know that all emails on that topic are for your action only.

Once you've done the above, a few more simple rules will round off the process. First, make sure all persons in charge know that if an email is not for them, they must leave it "unread" or if they do wish to read it, they should take the additional step of marking it "unread" so that its intended recipient, will see it as unread until he/she opens it and takes action on it.

Finally, develop the practice of checking through the "Send" box before responding to any email. This is just in case, someone else has mistakenly assumed that the contents of that email fell under their assigned category, and has answered it already. Nothing would be more confusing to a recipient than to receive two different emails appearing to have been written by two different people, both covering the same subject matter, from the same email account! :-)

Hope the above tips are helpful :-) Comments, questions or requests to cover particular topics, email me at spiralcraft1701@gmail.com.