copyright 2002 Leipper Management Group. All rights reserved
A domain name, such as yourassociation.org, not only provides a convenient means to access web pages about your association, it can also offer communications benefits for the association. When you own a domain name, you can define e-mail addresses as needed to help conduct the business of your association. Depending upon the services of the host for your domain name you can set up independent mailboxes for these addresses or you can just have them forwarded to some other address. It is even possible to forward mail to a set of addresses.
There are many benefits to an effective association e-mail address policy:
Association addresses can provide a convenient long term address to communicate with a person or office that is less likely to change than a personal address.
The privacy of officers and directors can be enhanced by publicizing only the association addresses.
Association addresses can be set to automatically forward e-mail to a correspondence file to enhance accountability and reduce liability concerns
Functional addresses, such as president@yourassociation.org, can be kept up to date so that e-mail to this address will always get to the current office holder.
Members can be provided the benefit of an individual association addresses that promotes the association and gives the members a better affiliation with the association.
An e-mail address can be established for a group or committee so that sending messages to everyone on the committee is simplified. This also allows a central point management of committee communications to simplify the management overhead of keeping everyone informed.
These benefits suggest that an association that owns a domain name adopt a policy to define functional addresses for officers and standing committees. Personal member addresses could be offered as a membership benefit. The addresses of groups, such as the board or committees, should not be publicized but be kept as internal to the association and subject to change if abused.