Recently i’ve been questioning the value of having a contact form. If somebody contacts me via the form, i tend to give it priority over everything else, it’s the same on my other sites. However most of the time, people are basically asking for something which eats up my time and rewards them whilst doing nothing for me…
Journalists
A great example of this is a few journalists who’ve contacted theleavingcert.com in the run up to the leaving cert, basically looking for favours. Some, we’ve dealt with before and are perfectly polite and will thank us for taking the trouble to help them etc… others will ask us for help, they’ll get it and that’s end of communication, no thanks, no acknowledgement, nothing…
This has happened on a few occasions now this summer so i’ve decided to relegate the contact page link from the main menu to a link in the footer in order to make people go hunting a bit more if they want to contact us.
I was analysing our submissions and the vast majority are from individuals looking for information which i can get with a google search. But if students contact us and i think they’re in genuine need of information, i’ll always make the effort to reply even if what they’re looking for is just a google search away. It is thankless most of the time, but these guys are also are audience, so i’ll always try to look after them as best i can…
Selective Replies
I like the idea of selecting who you reply to. A lot of large organisations i.e. google & apple seem to do it, but they can afford to. Over the past few months, i have ignored several emails sent through the contact form on this site simply because i was just too busy to respond to them all and the messages themselves either ‘demanded’ something from me or else were too passive in nature i.e. ‘we thought you might like our bla bla bla and it may be of interest to you readers…’ But like i said above, if i think somebody is genuinely seeking assistance which i can provide, i’ll respond.
Removing the contact form
Removing a contact form is probably a step too far. A contact form is probably the most formal and private method of communication online these days between website and user. Whilst most of us are on Facebook or Twitter, there’s still plenty who are not and will refuse to join for whatever reason. For those guys, their email address is their Facebook. It doesn’t make them any less ‘important’, it just makes it more difficult and time consuming to communicate with them online. So if you kill the contact form, you also kill potential contact from those guys…
I won’t be removing any of my contact forms, but i will be making it clear that from now on, a ‘selective replies’ policy will be in place. You may or may not get a response… i think that’s the most sensible way of treating contact forms from now on without ditching them all together although those journalist antics did tempt me on theleavingcert.com…