Mass Email Communication Options
Overview
There are a variety of mass email communication solutions available across USF and IT is committed to helping you find the best option to suit your needs. What that is depends on the types of communications you’re sending out, how frequently, and to what populations.
A brief overview of the most common types of mass communication solutions are provided below.
Internal Distribution Lists
The most common type of mass communication solution. An internal distribution list (DL) is great for small-to-large scale internal communications. These DLs are highly customizable and offer options to restrict who can send to them or even specify moderators to approve messages before they’re distributed. Internal DLs are best suited to teams/departments who need to send out relatively frequent messages to a mostly static population of recipients.
Requests to create or update internal DLs can be submitted to help@usf.edu by an Authorized Department Representative.
Dynamically-populated Distribution Lists
Similar to internal DLs, dynamically-populated DLs offer all the same features as a normal DL with the caveat that the members are automatically added or removed based on a given affiliation instead of through a manual process. A variety of dynamically-populated DLs exist and can broadly be thought of as targeting specific affiliations within a particular department. For example, all Staff members under the English department or all Grad Students under Engineering.
These dynamically-populated DLs are best suited for departmental communications that need to go out to specific, affiliation-based populations within their department.
If you are interested in leveraging one of these DLs, please submit a ticket to help@usf.edu so we can discuss your needs.
M365 Groups
M365 Groups are a collaboration tool created by Microsoft and they come with various bells and whistles (e.g. a SharePoint site) but can function like a distribution list. Two key differences between an internal DL and an M365 Group are that Groups are self-service and can include external (non-USF) recipients.
Anyone can create an M365 Group, add members, specify owners, and generally manage it how they see fit. If you are curious about M365 Groups, we’d recommend reading Microsoft’s documentation page here and the related articles provided at the bottom.
Please note that the email addresses for M365 Groups end in “@usfedu.onmicrosoft.com”.
Contact Lists
Contact lists (sometimes called Personal Distribution Lists) are user-created and user-maintained distribution lists. Anyone can create a contact list, and they can contain external email addresses. It is important to note that contact lists will not show up in the Global Address List (GAL). That is, other people will not be able to see a contact list you create unless you specifically share it with them.
Contact lists are a good way to send regular messages to a large group of people if only yourself or a few people need to send to that group.
Method | Self-service | Recipients | Automatically updates | Visible in the GAL | Sending restrictions available |
Internal DL | No | Internal | No | Yes* | Yes |
Dynamically-populated DL | No | Internal | Yes | Yes* | Yes |
M365 Group | Yes | Internal/External | No | Yes | No |
Contact List | Yes | Internal/External | No | No | No |
*Internal and Dynamically-populated DLs can be configured so that they are hidden in the GAL.
Dynamics Customer Insights
Dynamics Customer Insights is a powerful marketing platform for customer outreach. Dynamics is recommended for mass email when your audience is several hundred and it is the platform when your audience is over 2000. Dynamics allows for rich and informative email creation with real time analytics to improve the reach of your messaging.
Audiences within Dynamics are manage via Pre-built segments which connect to University databases to automatically update based on the roles humans hold at the university. You can learn more on the Dynamics SharePoint