Tulane President’s E-mail Speaks to Students Displaced by Katrina

Five months after Hurricane Katrina caused at least $200 million in damage and closed its doors for a semester, Tulane University re-opened for classes today.

And without current postal addresses for students, faculty and staff, e-mail was the only way Tulane officials could be sure to reach them with a message welcoming them back.

As a result, Tulane last week sent an e-mail to a list of 20,000 students, faculty and staff with a personal message from the school’s president Scott Cowen.

Industry veterans involved with the project contend it has lessons from which any marketer can draw.

“It gives me great pleasure to welcome you all back to New Orleans and to Tulane University. Welcome home,” says Cowen. “For the last four months, we have been preparing non-stop for your return.’

The video portion of the e-mail takes up a small portion of the upper right of the computer screen. The rest of the space is taken by a Tulane newsletter offering a written a welcome-home message along with an events calendar and a place for people to share their stories.

Under the video portion of the e-mail are a button recipients can click on to contribute to rebuild Tulane, and a button they can click through to read the school’s renewal plan.

The newsletter can be viewed at Tulane.edu.

Scott Madlener, executive vice president of interactive strategy for Performance Communications Group, the company that manages Tulane’s e-mail efforts, contends that allowing recipients to click around a newsletter and read while a video plays aids in message retention.

“Most companies serve video in e-mail as the end unto itself,” said Madlener. “So I’m either watching a video, or I’m looking at a Web page. People have an attention span of about 21 seconds. Even if you have a 10 minute training video, people are going to get about 21 seconds out of it. What we do is add multitasking to that endeavor.”

Performance Communications Group designs its e-mails so recipients can read an article and click around while the video plays. “It’s e-mail for the MTV generation,” said Madlener. “The retention factor of people reading something is less than 10%; if they hear it, it’s in the teens and if they see it, it’s in the twenties. If you combo all these different means of getting your message across, you add to the retention factor.”

Chris Baggot, co-founder and chief marketing officer for ExactTarget, the company whose software is behind Tulane’s efforts, said he is increasingly seeing organizations use video in e-mail to deliver personal messages.

“The goal of all organizations is to build a better relationship with their constituents,” he said. “What these guys at Tulane have done so well is to humanize their message, which is something we advocate across the board. [Cowen] has completely humanized his message by saying ‘hey, I want you back.’ The video is cool, but the powerful concept here is one human being trying to talk to another human being.”

Baggot said commercial e-mailers are increasingly incorporating the same technique. For example, he said, a pharmaceutical company he could not name used it to help its sales representatives reach anesthesiologists.

“Pharmaceutical companies spend a ton of money trying to keep that rep in front that doctor, and it’s getting harder and harder to do,” he said. “Now we’re seeing a lot of instances where they’re using e-mail and incorporating the rep into the message.”

Early results indicate a high degree of interest in Tulane’s message.

Within the first 24 hours after the e-mail was sent, 6,500 recipients had opened the e-mail and collectively viewed more than 7,500 minutes of the video.

The response is particularly good given that some of the addresses on the file are probably no longer valid, said Madlener. “People are moving around; they might not be accessing the e-mail address that is on file,” he said. ExactTarget estimates that 25% of a typical e-mail list will go bad in a given year under normal circumstances.

Meanwhile, according to reports, about 87% of 6,400 pre-Katrina enrolled undergraduates are expected to come back to Tulane. The school had to cut 150 full-time faculty positions at its uptown campus and 130 from its medical school, as well as five undergraduate majors in science and engineering, and eight athletics programs.