Unlocking the Power of Smart Communications
Date: June 24, 2021
Required Access: Superusers
Many of our Superusers have expressed an interest in learning more about planning Smart Communications. Let’s look at some tips that will help you send Smart Coms like a pro!
Benefits of Using Smart Communications
- You can track open rates in order to know – and be able to prove – who has read your messages.
- Smart Communications make manual tasks less tedious. Gathering the information you need is easier, since everything is in one place and you won’t need to go searching for it.
- The communication will automatically be documented in each recipient’s individual record in Borealis.
When are Smart Communications Useful?
Scenario 1: When you need to engage regularly with many people from different organisations, and you want to personalize the message.
- If you engage with a group (or groups) of stakeholders on a regular basis, Smart Coms are a handy way to communicate with them. Maybe you need to contact a group of people who attend recurring meetings, or to regularly provide updates to a board of directors.
Scenario 2: When you need to communicate quickly with any list of stakeholders who have something in common.
- Sometimes you need to contact a group of people who are linked to a specific issue, asset, or event. You may want to follow up with your stakeholders after a specific public hearing, or contact those within a buffer zone around your infrastructure asset to let them know about upcoming maintenance.
How to Manage Smart Com Recipients
You can manage your recipients in a few different ways, depending on how, when, and why you need to communicate with them.
Smart Lists
When you create a Smart List, you can select people that hold a specific role within their organization rather than searching for recipients by name. This is particularly helpful when you’re contacting elected officials, who hold positions that may change frequently.
For example, if you need to periodically contact all of the Town Mayors in a region to provide project status updates, or if you need to contact Fire Chiefs in a certain region after an incident, Smart Lists help you make sure that you’re always talking to the right people. Smart Lists are updated automatically to include all stakeholders with the appropriate role as recipients. Once you create a Smart List, you can make it available to other members of your team.
This article can help you get started: Create and Edit Smart Distribution Lists.
Distribution Lists
Distribution Lists allow you to manage groups of stakeholders who have something in common. If you communicate with a certain group of people on a recurring basis, distribution lists provide a convenient way to quickly and easily address the entire group rather than selecting each participant individually.
This article can help you get started: Create and Edit Distribution Lists.
Getting the Most out of Smart Communications
To harness the power of Smart Communications while keeping the process simple, you should:
- Have a clear idea of when and why you want to send the Smart Com.
- Who do I want to send it to? How often? Why?
- Ensure that stakeholder titles and their roles within their organization are entered properly.
- If you communicate with your stakeholders in more than one language, be sure to define a preferred ‘language of communication’ for each individual.
- Always enter a valid email address for each stakeholder.
All of these tips apply to both Smart Communications sent by email and sent by postal mail.
Tips and Tricks
Create a Communication Calendar Widget and share it with your team to be sure that none of your stakeholders are overloaded with communications. To make your calendar even more efficient, you can add report filters to individual records. With the new interface, you can go even further and add a related report!
Use Distribution Lists > Data Quality Reports to ensure that your stakeholder records include all of the information you need to send Smart Coms.
For more information about how to create, edit and send Smart emails, check out this article.
Smart Communications are an add-on to Borealis that will save you time and make it easier to keep groups of stakeholders informed.