My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
Dear You
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Many email newsletters we receive start with “Dear [NAME],” - and “NAME” is magically replaced with your name. Just today, I received an email with the subject line “made me think of you, Emily (offer info inside)”. Now this was very insulting to me. The person (but mostly their automation) who sent this email to me clearly did not think of me. Maybe they had some thought of the collective “me” because they thought about everyone on their email list as a general whole. But I felt that they had traded relationship building for efficiency and automation. That is fast tech over slow tech, and I’m not down for it. We are not suckers - and we should be honest in our blast emails. I hope to be honest with YOU, reader. I love that my childhood best friends and my siblings and my spouse and some of my closest work colleagues care about me and my work enough to be on this email list, and I can imagine those individual people opening and reading these emails. I can actually think about them when I send this. But I can’t think about all of the 500+ people receiving this email (not to mention that a chunk of that number are just spam bots) all at the same time when I’m writing. And so I don’t plan on using this “fast tech” of email that lets me send 500+ messages in under half a second (what efficiency! what scale!) for relationship building. I hope to build trust through consistent thoughtful content, honesty, and vulnerability. But I would really like to spend more actual time with any and all of you who can make time to chat. Email me back and we’ll get a time to do that. In addition to this newsletter, I do love writing personal letters/emails to individuals. One way I’ve done this is in my “Dear…” series. These letters are written with the intention of being made public, because in them I am thanking someone else for their contributions and I want them to be publicly recognized for their work, as well as wanting to spread the word about their contributions so others can benefit from them. Below I’ve shared the latest entry in my “Dear…” series - I hope it helps one of you who might be needing a tool that helps with creating calendar events. It may seem simple, but it can be really useful in certain scenarios. And below that I’ll be sharing the links to all the previous entries in the “Dear…” series. If you read any and they help you also, please let me know! I’d be more than glad to pass the kudos on to the subject of the letter. Peace, Emily Dear Atymic - or whatever your real name is, Thank you for being you. I don’t know much about you, but I do know that you are a generous person and a talented programmer. I also want to thank you specifically for your tool Calndr.link, which I really love. I haven’t actually had a use case for using the tool yet, but a potential one did come up recently. Reflecting on it now, I wonder if I would have had the foresight to search for a tool like this had I been presented with the use case before knowing about it. The situation is this: at one of the social profit (new name for non-profit I’m hoping to push, at least in the US) organizations I work with, we are setting up a call using Zoom, but we don’t want our students to use the Zoom registration feature. Instead, we use a form tool called FormAssembly because it connects to our Salesforce account (wow, lots of feelings about Salesforce in our social profit community over here right now - I’m curious how people in Australia are talking about it). But without a registration page, how can we help our students signing up for the call create calendar events with the Zoom link? I’m trying to put myself in some hardcore beginner’s mindset and forget that I know about Calndr.link. Would I have searched Ecosia for an answer, or maybe asked ChatGPT? Maybe I wouldn’t have even thought to do that, and I would have advised my colleagues to use the follow-up email to ask students to make their own calendar events. We have been working pretty fast to get this registration form out, so I might have thought I didn’t have time to find a nicer solution to this. But luckily I had been introduced to the tool just a few days before we needed it for this use case. I received an email after submitting a Google Form, and the email contained the calndr.link in it. I recommended your tool to my colleagues and I hope they choose to use it. It’s weird, I can’t really think of how else I could use this in the future, but I feel confident that the situations will arise, and I’ll be ready with this solution for them. I was thrilled to buy you a coffee as a small thanks for this tool, and for you being you. Keep doing the good work you do :-) Peace, Emily https://www.maketechworkforyou.com/newsletter/dear-atymic-calndrlink https://www.maketechworkforyou.com/newsletter/dear-vibhor-goel-parse-multi-select-picklist https://www.maketechworkforyou.com/newsletter/dear-evangelia-stamatopoulou-ics-to-csv-converter https://www.maketechworkforyou.com/newsletter/dear-nathan-franklin-power-profile-tools |
Emily Hicks-Rotella
My purpose: For all mission-driven, social justice-oriented people and organizations to have the confidence and skills to learn, use and love data & technology as part of achieving their missions.
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