Audience
Employees
Question
How do I send an email to BSU/NTC Listservs?
Answer
Bemidji State University and Northwest Technical College have two listservs that are available for general use on campus.
Faculty, staff and administrators at BSU and NTC have the ability to distribute email messages to an entire campus using listservs.
Fac_staff_l listserv
Fac_staff_l, which reaches all employees with a BSU or NTC email address, has no option to opt out. The BSU listserv reaches all BSU employees, while the NTC list reaches all NTC employees and a select group of BSU employees. These listservs are intended for messages relevant to an entire campus, such as announcements of campus-wide forums, personnel changes, important dates or information from Human Resources, or notices of events on campus that are open to everyone.
To use fac_staff_l, address your email to:
Social_l listserv
Social_l functions identically to fac_staff_l, but allows employees the option to opt out. These listservs are intended for messages more social in nature, such as announcements of receptions, retirements, or off-campus events and activities not related to the university or college.
To use social_l, address your email to:
Note: Only a few BSU employees can send messages to NTC listservs. If you have business reasons to use the NTC listservs and do not currently have access, please contact the Office of Communications and Marketing.
Message moderation
Submissions to the lists are moderated by the Office of Communications and Marketing and must be approved before they are sent to the campus. Messages must include:
- Comprehensive, descriptive subject lines that contain sufficient information for recipients to assess a message’s relevance to them. For messages about specific events, subject lines must include dates and times.
- Contact information for a specific person or office who can be contacted by readers for more information about the event, activity or news in the message.
While nearly all messages submitted to the listservs are approved, there are three common reasons messages may be rejected:
- Insufficient or non-descriptive subject lines.
- Missing contact information.
- The message isn’t relevant to the entire campus.
Listserv messages may be rejected for other reasons, such as advocacy for a political cause or candidate, messages that include material that is primarily personal in nature, or messages that communicate individual opinions or positions on a particular subject. Moderation decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. In nearly all cases, senders of rejected messages receive an emailed explanation for the rejection. These explanations often include tips on how to resubmit the message in a format that will be approved.
File attachments
File attachments are allowed on listserv emails, and most file types that can be commonly viewed on both Apple and Windows computers are permitted. Examples of allowable attachment types include JPEG or PNG images, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and Adobe PDFs. Other types of files – particularly files associated with a specific software program such as Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Photoshop – may be rejected. Employees submitting attachments with listserv messages are encouraged to keep the file size as low as possible; messages including large attachments over 5 MB in size (either as a single file or a collection of files) may be rejected.
Approval process
After sending your message to a listserv, you’ll almost immediately receive an automated reply confirming that the message has been received by the system and informing you that it is being held for moderation. Approval by the Office of Communications and Marketing typically happens within an hour, but can sometimes take longer.
For more information
Feel free to contact Andy Bartlett in the Office of Communications and Marketing at x2746 or andy.bartlett@bemidjistate.edu if you have questions about the listservs or about a particular message you have submitted.