Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies, events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing 25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side, we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and respect different stakeholders' value.

翻译：群发邮件在组织中广泛用于向员工传达信息，是使员工了解政策、活动、领导层动态等事项的重要工具。然而在大型组织中，信息过载问题普遍存在。缺乏成效的组织群发邮件不仅浪费员工的时间和组织的资金，还导致员工对组织使命与优先事项缺乏认知或合规性不足。本论文聚焦于改进组织群发邮件系统，具体通过以下方式：1）开展定性研究以理解不同利益相关方；2）进行实地研究评估个性化对促使员工阅读群发邮件的影响；3）设计支持沟通者评估群发邮件的工具。我们在明尼苏达大学开展这些研究，访谈了25名员工（包括发件人与收件人），共纳入317名参与者。研究发现当前大学群发邮件系统收效甚微，员工仅能记住22%的已传达信息。为鼓励员工阅读高层级信息，我们实施了一个多利益相关方个性化框架，将组织重要信息与员工偏好信息混合呈现，使研究对象的邮件识别率提升20%。在发送端，我们通过迭代设计开发了群发邮件评估平台原型。实地评估发现，群发邮件的消息级性能指标有助于沟通者优化邮件设计。我们收集了眼动追踪数据，并开发了一种神经网络技术，仅通过收件人与浏览器的交互行为即可估算每条消息的阅读时长，将估算准确率提升至73%。总之，本研究揭示了如何设计既高效传达信息又尊重不同利益相关方价值的组织群发邮件系统。