Know. Feel. Do.

In the past few weeks since meeting Bill Jensen, I've used the "Know, Feel, Do" style of writing email, and I've been amazed at the results. I've since passed it along to several co-workers, and they report similar results.

KNOW: What Does the Email Recipient Need to Know?
FEEL: How Do You Want Them to Feel?
DO: What Do You Want Them to Do?
Sum it all up in a 3x5" space ("above the fold" in email).

A few emails I've sent recently are attached so you can see what I mean:

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From: John Porcaro
Sent: Friday, December 5, 2003 10:55 AM
To: H&E Sales & Marketing
Subject: Who is Shopping at Retail: Voice of the Customer Focus Group video clips

Thanks for attending yesterday’s meeting. It was inspiring and thought-provoking to hear from our customers—in their own voice—describe their experiences shopping at retail.

If you didn’t get to attend, I really think you would enjoy seeing these short video clips yourself. And I encourage you to share it with others who didn’t see it.

The slide deck with embedded video clips is linked on the Channel Research B/R/S Segmentation Study SharePoint site.

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From: John Porcaro
Sent: Monday, December 8, 2003 1:16 PM
To: H&E Sales & Marketing
Subject: Worldwide Marketing Communications

Sharing information across teams, between subsidiaries, and with our partners (retailers, sales associates, vendors, agencies) can be frustrating and time consuming. But free-flowing communication is the key to better collaboration, saving time searching for people, documents, or digital assets, increasing partner satisfaction, and making our own jobs easier by leveraging work already done.

Our H&E Marketing Communications Team is dedicated to making things easier for you and your partners. We’ve been newly chartered with building communications tools and procedures that support our division’s efforts worldwide, including the brand-new HEDweb, coming soon. And we’re working closely with the SharePoint 2.0, Office 2003, and MSWeb teams to leverage a lot of the cool features you’ve seen in demos of the new Office System.

What We Need From You:
1. We are working on gathering requirements for upcoming projects, and we need your suggestions. We’ll be contacting many of you individually in the near future, but if you have questions, comments, or suggestions, feel free to contact me directly.

2. If you’re deploying SharePoint team sites, Extranet Portals, or have partner-facing web sites, we’d love to hear about your business requirements. It might make sense to leverage assets, or simply learn from each others’ plans.

For more information, visit our team website on HEDweb. A good rollup of our plans can be found in a recent presentation we’ve given to many of you. Feel free to contact us individually if you have any questions. We look forward to hearing from you.

Read on if you’re interested in the details:

Comments

[Brian]

Thanks Jon! Good stuff. Will safe me a lot of miscommunication.

[Brian Meyer]

In Jensen's book he recommends Know-Feel-Do for various types of communication but not for e-mail. For that he lays out the plan of "C-L-E-A-R" e-mails. Know-Feel-Do is intended for verbal communications such as Voicemails, quick oral presentations, or if Powerpoint presenting, he mentions changing the one thing you want them to KNOW into a question in order to create discussion.
With that being said, for those of us who used to write novel-length e-mails, Know-Feel-Do is a step in the right direction!