6 tips to get email responses

Emails don’t get lost. They get forgotten. If you’re waiting for a response right now, chances are you won’t be getting one. You need to follow up.

I used to worry that follow up emails felt like nagging, but now I realize I’m usually grateful when people give me a nudge. It’s easy to lose track of the endless emails flooding my inbox. (I’ve tried to be disciplined about inbox zero a few times, but haven’t had much success.) These follow up emails put people back on my radar screen.

Here are six of my key ingredients for successful follow up emails:

1. Remind the recipient of the context behind your original email. Be polite.
2. Make it clear what you are asking of them. This should be concrete and easily described in one sentence max. Make it easy for them to check your request off their to do list.
3. Make it easy to read. Short paragraphs that they can skip if they remember what you’re talking about are best.
4. Provide them with some new relevant information that you didn’t include in your original email.
5. Make their lives as easy as possible. For example, if you want them to introduce you to someone, you might want to write them a draft email that they can edit.
6. (optional) Acknowledge that emails often get buried in email and that you just wanted to follow up.

In case you missed the theme of these tips … be clear about what you need and keep things simple.

In my experience it can sometimes take three or four emails to get a response. Don’t give up. Get creative and find ways to stay on people’s radar screens.

Charitable giving can activate the same pleasure-reward centers, the dopaminergic centers, in the brain that are very closely tied to habit formation

— Bill Harbaugh, economist at the University of Oregon who studies altruism. (New York Times, Dec 10, 2012)

Hazelnut Founder Cyrus Stoller running into Mayor Ed Lee

Considering tweets are only 140 character, they take me a surprisingly long time to write. I hate interrupting my workflow to tweet throughout the day, so I turned to HootSuite to plan my tweets and publish them on a pre-determined schedule.

I chose Hootesuite because it offers an AutoSchedule feature that distributes tweets throughout the day and built-in analytics that make it really easy to see which links followers are engaging with.

Preparing tweets ahead of time has challenged me to be more purposeful in my messaging. I’ve been trying to present both new information to followers and revisit themes and studies pertaining to Hazelnut.

tl;dr What I’ve learned so far: it’s hard to consistently write good tweets.

Guide to winning a hackathon

A few people have asked for some tips on how to win a hackathon … I’m happy to oblige. I’ve adapted the slides that I presented at an Appsterdam SF meetup after winning the National AngelHack competition.

Here’s a link to the slides on Speaker Deck.

Here’s Kristen, Jas, Cyrus, and Matt with the check. We’ll have to take another picture with Stephanie and Patrick (they had to leave early). You can see the rest of the pictures from the hackathon here.

Hackathon win

I have some exciting news to share. This weekend I was part of a team that won the UC Berkeley’s Digital Health Hackathon with my old roommate and some of our mutual friends (Matt, Kristen, Stephanie, Jas, and Patrick).

We made a tamagotchi-like app that would help motivate kids (ages 6-10) to report quality-of-life data to their physicians. This is particularly important for kids with diabetes and asthma.

Right now, it’s a challenge for parents to sit kids down multiple time per day to have them answer serious questions. With the app we made this weekend, kids are rewarded for answering their questions by keeping their DoubleYou (the character in our app) healthy and happy and eventually earning new outfits and accessories.

The idea is to make reporting this medical data fun for kids; hopefully, they’ll remind their parents to pass the data onto their doctor because they’ll want to see how their DoubleYou is doing.

We’re hoping there will be a domino effect — it will be easier for parents to collect needed data and then easier for doctors to have a more complete picture of how their young patients are doing.

Since it was a health related hackathon, I took the opportunity to ask people what they thought about Hazelnut. They were excited and have started making introductions to employers who might be interested in offering Hazelnut to their employees.

-Cyrus