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| {{a|work|
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| [[File:biblical outreach.png|450px|frameless|center]]
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| }}A mass-communication of something ''important'' — “importance” being in the eye of the beholder — to your whole client-base. How a firm does this is a measure of its commercial sophistication, first, its technological sophistication, second, and its [[client communications|communication skill]], third.
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| The usual means of client outreach is to get a dedicated client outreach team — there will be one, somewhere in the operations stack — to handle it by mass-market mailshot. If so, the die is cast: you have already taken the wrong path and it is too late to change. Take this as commiseration, consolation, and fortification to intervene earlier next time. And when you do, we have suggestions ''how'' to write a client communication. These come from the [[JC]]’s heart: being an [[inhouse]] dogsbody he’s been on the wrong end of a lot of these bastards in 30 years of practice, and has as much interest as you do in your getting them right.
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| ===Client outreach is spam===
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| First thing to note: from a ''client’s'' perspective, any client outreach, ''at best'', is ''[[spam]]''. At ''best''.
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| In most cases, you will be outreaching to advise (i) of some forthcoming regulatory change to your own operation with a peripheral impact on the client, and what you plan to do about it; or (ii) some [[snafu]] in your systems meaning you have transgressed some technical regulation; or (iii) an internal policy disclosure point which some bright spark in the risk management federation has dreamed up and decreed needs to be urgently notified to the world at large.
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| ===Is it ''really'' that important?===
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| The [[professional managerial class]]’s structural self-obsession is such that it sees its own role as a sacred calling of utmost importance to the future safety and good order of the political economy itself. It must do, to be able to sleep, given the absurd [[rent]] it extracts from that same political economy.
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| [[Middle manager]]s do not so much ''have trouble seeing the wood for the trees'', as ''understanding there is a wood at all''. “All there is ''this'' tree. ''My'' tree. The one with many thin branches, supporting many fat birds, like ''me''.”
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| Through this prism, one is well insulated from the realities beyond the tree’s crown. The self-involved rarely perceive the reception their communications will get once they cross that threshold and goes out into the wide world.<ref>I know, I know: “look at yourself, o weirdo, you and your one-man wiki, publishing into the void.”</ref> If you are lucky, this will be studied indifference.
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| So first, ask: ''do we ''really'' need to communicate this to clients?'' Will [[Chicken-licken|the sky fall in on our heads]] if we do not?
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| ===Is [[bulk email]] the right way to do it?===
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| Assume that, despite robust challenge and respectful [[escalation]] to the head of [[compliance]] the conclusion remains that yes, this really is significant enough to draw to every client’s attention. Then ask: okay, that being the case, do you really want to do that by ''spam''? Now here the size and public orientation of your business will be determinative. If you are a retail bank mailing six million people about a change to the terms and conditions of their current accounts, then ''absolutely'' you want to be doing this by spam. The more spam-like the better. The main objective of client outreach to retail clients is to say, “[[look, I tried]]”.<ref>Cynics might say this is really means “no bulk communication to retail clients is ever that important.” There is an element of truth to that.</ref>
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| If you are an investment bank, your clients will pay you revenue in the hundreds of thousands or millions a year. If something is important enough to tell a million dollar client, it is worth doing in person. Have your sales people [[Talk, don’t email|call]]. This is called [[relationship management]].
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| {{sa}}
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| *[[Client communications]] | | *[[Client communications]] |
| *[[Email]]
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| *[[Dear Client]]
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| *[[Please be advised]]
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| *[[Talk, don’t email]]
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| {{ref}}
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| {{c|Communication}}
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