The Office of Academic Affairs has implemented guidelines for broadcast e-mail requests to reduce the number of e-mails sent to students, faculty and staff.
The new rules, according to the GROK Knowledge Base, will limit the system to send only high-priority messages. The guidelines were officially presented Sept. 28, said Stacia Haynie, vice provost for Academic Affairs.
“The major change is that we did not really have any formal guidelines before,” Haynie said. “One of the things we wanted to do is be able to provide guidance to guidelines.”
The criteria for submitting a request says the content of broadcast e-mails must concern a majority of the targeted campus. Requests are limited to only University entities, and messages must have high importance, according to GROK.
The guidelines prohibit requests for events with less than 500 people attending, messages geared toward specific colleges, messages from individual professors or students, and advertisements and messages containing attachments.
Broadcast e-mails from organizations like Student Government are limited to one per week.
If a request is not acceptable, students and faculty have other options to broadcast their message like the LSU Calendar, student media outlets, PAWS News and LSU Today, the GROK website said.
“This sort of electronic communication can be easily facilitated,” Haynie said. “We [have] seen an increase in requests to use broadcast e-mails.”
Haynie said the more e-mails students receive, the less attention they pay to them.
“We tried to find balance between accessibility and being sensitive to the need for the University to have access through broadcast e-mails to convey extremely important messages,” she said.
Haynie said the Office of Academic Affairs receives about three requests daily, which often ties up the server. She said these new guidelines are another way to protect the resource and benefit students.
“Certainly, we preserve mechanisms to convey priority messages to students,” Haynie said. “And then we have an appropriate filter so students aren’t receiving dozens of e-mails during the day.”
 
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Contact Sydni Dunn at [email protected]