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Employee Mailing List Guidelines

Employee Mailing List Guidelines & FAQ's

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What faculty and staff email lists are available?

  1. Employees@depauw.edu, faculty@depauw.edu and staff@depauw.edu email lists for official campus communications only. Only specific senders are enabled to send messages to these lists.
  2. Discuss@depauw.edu email list, an opt-in, more informal list for sharing information and invitations and engaging in community conversations. All list members can send and receive messages through the list.

    All members from the former facultystaff list were automatically subscribed to Discuss in July 2019. However, this was a one-time addition of members en masse and new list members may opt-in following that date.

More details, including information about the official Faculty/Staff/Employees and how to subscribe to Discuss, are available at Email Distribution Lists.

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How do departments or programs send to the official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists?

Programs and departments must use department-named accounts for messaging to the official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists (E.g., DeanofFaculty, registrar, psychology, etc.). Student groups who wish to send a message to Discuss must ask their faculty or staff advisor to send it for them.

If your department does not have a department email account and wishes to have one, request it through the Special Account, Group Email List, or Print/Copy Card Request form.

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How do departments or programs send to the Discuss list?

Any academic or administrative department/program, faculty member, or staff member can join Discuss to send messages to the list. Find details here to join Discuss.

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What are guidelines for using the official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists?

The goal of the lists is to help focus messaging to campus at-large and reduce the number of individual messages that everyone receives. Toward that, following are some general guidelines of best practices universities often use for official lists.

The official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists are intended for dissemination of important announcements, need-to-know information, and other items related to University business. Examples include:

  • Notification of significant developments affecting the audience group (examples: new projects, new policies, national recognition, campus speakers, special programs)
  • Notification of service outages or other disruptions to University operations (examples: power outages, road closures, changes to food service hours, major technology issues)
  • Important employee announcements and time-sensitive notifications from Human Resources or the Business Office (examples: open enrollment dates, payroll changes)
  • Announcements of class schedule changes, new course offerings (i.e., list from the Registrar) and operational enhancements (examples: Convocation schedules, new resources in the library, adoption of a new vendor)
  • Full schedules of upcoming workshop, colloquia, or seminar series (example: Prindle Institute fall programming schedule, Faculty Development spring workshops schedule), call for proposals for awards or activities (example: spring reading courses call)

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Can (should?) departments or programs use the official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists to announce events?

For announcing individual events or activities, please use the Campus Labs calendar instead of sending one-off email messages to the Faculty/Staff/Employees lists. This will help ensure the official lists are reserved for official business and important announcements.

Find information about how to post events to Campus Labs at Steps for room scheduling and event creation in Campus Labs.  If you have questions, contact campuslabs@depauw.edu.

Events that are posted on Campus Labs will be publicized to campus by Communication and Marketing via the faculty/staff DeBrief and the student “Download” e-newsletters, both of which will be distributed weekly. Some events in Campus Labs will be further promoted in DePauw’s social media platforms, as well.

Please avoid sending follow-up last-minute “reminder” emails about your events. These tend to add clutter to everyone’s inbox and continual reminders can become annoying. Instead, the weekly DeBrief will link to upcoming events for the next two weeks in Campus Labs so others can find just-in-time info about your upcoming event.

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What if our department is hosting a speaker, poster session, or other event that instructors from other departments might want to include in their course syllabi?

Here’s an example sequence you might use to communicate to campus about an upcoming event in your department:

  1. Early in the semester your department sends a heads-up memo to the official list(s) or Discuss announcing that the event is in planning so instructors are aware and can build it into their course syllabi.
  2. Your department posts the event in the Campus Labs calendar.
  3. Closer to the date of the event, the weekly faculty/staff DeBrief and student “The Download” e-newsletters from Communications and Marketing will publicize it.


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How do Departments or Programs send information to campus about new courses, courses with openings, etc.?

Department chairs and program directors can use department-named accounts to send notes to the official Faculty/Staff/Employees lists about new courses in their areas, courses with openings, etc., so advisors can share the information with their students. You are encouraged to combine information about all these courses into a single message rather than individual sending one-off’s. 

You might also use the e-Services bulletin board, which many students and others will see.


Last updated: 10-Mar-2021