What does it mean when an organisation writes back and says ‘I am the main contact for this area of work’, but then don’t want to give contact details? How do they know they’re the main contact?

A big impression is made about the culture of an organisation by sending an email to a generic email address. This is an ongoing survey and a number of councils have still not responded to an original request on 27 June.

The responses do continue to trickle in though - but of a very mixed variety. Some have led to good contacts and the beginnings of discussions. Some have led to named people being identified. When they are contacted, they don’t even have the netiquette to say ’sorry, this is of no interest’ (and I’m making the request from a .gov.uk domain so the approach is from another council, not a private sector firm).

Others announce ‘I am the contact’ but then don’t respond. Experience shows however, that where there is different contact with an organisation that there are often a number of people who would like to be part of the contact list.

So some organisations are making a rapid decision to say - ‘this person is the main contact’ . That person is then making a rapid decision to say ‘this is of no interest to me, and therefore no interest to the organisation’. But that’s a false understanding. Other experience shows that there is almost certainly people who will be interested but the message is not getting past self appointed gate-keepers and email sentries.

What might be a better way to handle requests like this is for them to be posted onto an intranet for a week rather than emailed to individuals with this tag line:

‘We’ve received this email about project x - if anyone is interested can you please contact the project directly and cc to T.Person’.

That way people inside the organisation can decide for themselves whether they want to find out more. I wonder how many organisations have an intranet noticeboard?

This will be the next question!