How to design an email that people will both open and read.

The critical point of designing emails is making them readable, accessible and welcoming to your audience.

The first part of that process is to get people to open the email. Tricks of the trade are simple. First, always send 'from' the same person and always use a standard subject line, such as 'Charity X e-news'. People look to see if they recognise patterns to decide what is spam, so uniform 'from' and 'subject' fields will affect whether your email is accepted.

Second, send from an email broadcast tool rather than Outlook so that your message gets to the recipient without being blocked (Third Sector, 13 September).

Third is email design. When deciding how to design your email, think about how committed your audience is and how hard they will work to read your news. Make sure it matches your brand so that it is recognisable as coming from you.

If you are sending an email to the general public, you have about 10 seconds to catch their attention. Make the email short, use colour and images (sparingly) to highlight headings and use taster sentences to get them to click through to the full story on your website.

When writing to a peer group or giving serious information to users or beneficiaries, you can get away with a much less pretty design. Longer emails, longer items and lists of links at the top may be acceptable, but don't go too far. If you have too much news, send shorter emails frequently to make them more readable.

And use your open and click-through reports. If people are clicking on one area of the email only, maybe they aren't seeing the rest.

Most of all, be consistent. Use your brand for a template, set the 'from' and 'subject' lines and use a standard layout. You need people to recognise your mail and find it easy to read.

You must look before you leap into discussion forums.

For the past couple of years, the buzz word for voluntary sector websites has been forum. A discussion forum is essentially a website composed of a number of member-written topics or 'threads'. Each thread entails a discussion in the form of a series of member-written posts.

Forums are normally moderated, most have a 'netiquette' to define what is allowed and many have a pre-defined list of topics to write about.

Unlike mailing lists, the discussion forum postings are held on the website for users to visit and read.

It sounds like a great idea for community-building - giving supporters, members or beneficiaries their say and encouraging users to share their experiences. But life is never that simple. Many charities have launched forums and then found that the expected 'community' does not materialise.

The software for discussion boards is cheap and easy to use. Once you have a discussion forum, however, the hard work begins. First, you need a community interested enough in your subject to want to discuss it on a regular basis. Then you need something to discuss - content in each thread to launch the conversation. Most importantly, you need the resources to moderate the forum - if postings aren't listed fairly quickly the users will soon lose interest.

So you need enough content to start a discussion, enough regular users to respond and the time to read everything before it goes live. Before jumping on the bandwagon, think about whether you have what it takes.

An empty discussion forum is a complete turn-off. As somebody said to me recently, when you invite strangers to a party, you need to spend time getting them to talk to each other, and a discussion forum takes at least as much management on a continuing basis.