As a leader of more than one large nonprofit organization that uses email to communicate to its members, I have a problem.  Our organizations are made up of smaller groups over which I have no real authority.  In this particular instance I have no control over how email addresses get used (or misused) and then harvested by private citizens.   

In my capacity as President of the Pearland Council of PTAs my major role is as an advisor.  In this capacity I can give my opinions but I have no direct authority over our individual local PTA units, and I have no vote at their meetings unless I have joined their specific PTA.  During this current school year, I have had to admonish more than one PTA to be careful to guard its email lists.  I have encouraged PTAs to use email services like "Constant Contact", or to at the very least to use the BCC (blind copy) address field. Using this approach, addresses in the BCC field do not appear in the email and will not be forwarded to the next round of recipients.  Another word of caution is to be careful about whom emails are sent--after they leave your outbox they can land anywhere! AND each message will travel through many servers before finally arriving at its destination.

For the most part, any email from a PTA to its email list should be informational in nature and the content must be approved by the group’s board.  Sharing information about when the school board meets is acceptable, but it is not appropriate to support a single candidate running for office.  Letting people know that your fundraiser kicks off the next day, that you need volunteers to help the librarian, or that you are having a parent involvement program next Thursday are all good uses of email.  Remember that advocacy works best when both you and your message are positive and uplifting.  Investing even a few moments to assess whether the message in question upholds the ideals of PTA and sends a positive message should help in your decision concerning what should be shared with a PTA email distribution list.

Within PISD, multiple PTA email lists have been harvested and are being used by individuals to advance non-PTA related agendas.  As long as the email does not contain any references about the PTA or profess to come from or speak on behalf of a PTA an individual can do with those email addresses what they wish.  More importantly, I as council president am not empowered to take any specific action.  I really can only caution people to use common sense with regard to their lists.  I am not in a position, nor am I interested in, preventing or otherwise interfering with any individual exercising his or her freedom of speech. 

I frequently receive emails from individuals who I know have captured my email address at some point over the years (probably from some broadcast e-mail distribution list).  Once this happens, the only redress any of us has is to block the offending sender using spam blocking software. I get literally hundreds of SPAM messages every day via my four different email addresses, so I believe strongly in their value.  (I am happy to recommend one or more specific spam-blocking software packages if you contact me privately.)  When someone sends an unsolicited email to you, it is always your right to ask the sender of the offending message to remove your address from that distribution list and to use the BCC address field in the future so that others are not able to collect email addresses in this fashion.

In any case, before I send out any email that is full of my opinion, or a forward something humorous, I ask myself three simple questions: who should get this?  would this offend anyone? AND is this a friend-only email? I caution anyone concerning the content of what they say in an email, most especially when an email has been composed in anger.  As you all well understand, damaging emails can spread like wild fire (through forwards and cc’s) and sound bites from audio files can be clipped and easily shared with multitudes of recipients.  The internet, in short, holds enormous power for the dissemination of information, but it does not discriminate between fact and rumor, truth and innuendo, or praise and screed.  Those fine distinctions remain solely human functions.

Send an email out today, but don’t tell them I told you to do it!

Try these links for more information...

For more information about Blind Carbon Copies (BCC): http://www.bestsecuritytips.com/xfsection+article.articleid+135.htm

For an excellent article about email confidentiality (or lack thereof): http://www.processor.com/editorial/article.asp?article=articles%2Fp2641%2F34p41%2F34p41.asp