By thinking beforehand about how you want messages to appear—each and every time you send one out—you can build a comprehensive set of notification templates that can be used by everyone who needs to create message content.
Building this kind of template is important. Without one in place, the haphazardness of your messages may dull their impact. But with one in use, you’ll give your initiators one less thing to think about in a crisis.
Here are factors to consider when standardizing your messages:
Settling on a naming convention might at first sound like an unnecessary waste of time, but in the heat of the moment you appreciate that you did so. The simple discipline of establishing naming conventions for messages, templates, and distribution lists will allow you to easily identify and find specific groups or message templates when you need to—and fast.
Plus, without establishing naming conventions, you’ll find it much harder to identify and clean up older content, thus making it more cumbersome to navigate your system and find what you’re actually looking for.
If you’d like to read the white paper from which this blog post was drawn, download Secrets to Implementing a Great Notification System.