Why updating your personal details is important
21 October 2015
BSHAA has a duty to members to spend their money wisely; alongside that is the need to make sure members are kept up to date with what is happening withing the Society and the world of audiology in general. The two committments are slightly at odds because at the time of writing (2015) it costs nearly £800 to send all the members a letter in the post. There is ambition to provide a dozen membershiop bulletins a year which on this basis would cost almost £10,000.
That’s why the Society announced back in 2014 that more and more it would rely on e-mail communicstions and it is also why the Society’s executive is constantly preaching the importantance of members keeping their personal details held by the BSHAA up to date.
To illustrate the point, of our 1,400 members we hold the email addresses of just over 1,000 and several hundred (yes an astonishing number) don’t work. This shortfall will be even more important to put right as the Society moves further into the world of a fully electronic ballot process amongst members.
There are several reasons for the shortfall in e-mail information and the first is more about the electronic mail software than it is about us having contact details. The problem here is that several hundred of our members work for the bigger firms and many give their office email address. Unfortunately the software being used by these companies often views bulk email messages as spam and puts them in the waste bin before members have had a chance to see them. Worse some simply reject the mail.
The software we use for electronic mailing also has a sensitive temperament; it detects when emails are rejected and after six strikes, assumes that you don’t want the mail and stops sending it.
Next we have the email addresses that use the big free servers: Aol, Google, Yahoo and the like. They also have ideas above their station and can reject our emails as spam. Worst we often get messages to say an email cannot be delivered because the inbox is full! Finally there are genuiine faulty email addresses where the details have been typed in badly or the member has simply change email address.
Much of the enhancement in value the Society is planning for members relies on electronic communication, so please consider these tips:
- Log on to your BSHAA account on this website and check that ALL your details are correct and correct them if they aren’t
- Check that you are using a personal email address rather than a company one
- Add the following emails to your safe or white list: chiefexecutve@bshaa.com; marketing@bshaa.com; secretary@bshaa.com (if you don’t know how to do this, check it out online)
If you follow these simple steps you should increase your chances of our emails getting through to you. If you want to check that all is well, follow this link where you will see all the ebulletins we have send over the last year or so. If you didn’t get them you need to CHECK YOUR DETAILS
Back to News