The NCAA News - News and Features

July 7, 1997

Broadcast e-mail service to speed communication

The NCAA national office has established a broadcast electronic-mail service that will enable the Association to forward important information directly and quickly to member institutions via the Internet.

The service permits the Association to simultaneously send, or "broadcast," messages to all e-mail addresses listed in the the national office's membership database, or to membership subgroups such as divisions or chief executive officers.

Such information as significant governance decisions and changes in rules interpretations can be shared quickly with the membership via broadcast e-mail.

Chief executive officers, commissioners of voting conferences, directors of athletics, faculty athletics representatives and senior woman athletics administrators are receiving a memorandum from NCAA Executive Director Cedric W. Dempsey announcing the service. The memo not only will be sent by regular mail but also to e-mail addresses that already are on file in the national office.

Many of the e-mail addresses currently included in the national office database were obtained from the annual Designation of Institutional Representatives form (Form 97-8). Other addresses were provided by institutions responding to a survey regarding e-mail use that was conducted last October.

Institutions that need to update e-mail addresses can use this year's Form 97-8 (mailed May 30) to do so. Institutions also can contact Donna Mabry (dmabry@ncaa.org) at the national office.

The Association will continue using regular mail and facsimiles to forward information to the membership, and The NCAA News will continue to serve as the Association's publication of notice.

But Association officials believe that electronic communication has the potential to significantly reduce mailing costs and related operating costs at the national office.

They anticipate that, as electronic communication becomes more common and the NCAA electronic communications network becomes more established, the Association may begin using e-mail and other forms of electronic communication as the exclusive method of distributing certain types of information.

The October 1996 survey revealed that approximately 80 percent of chief executive officers, athletics administrators and conference commissioners already have access to e-mail service.

The broadcast e-mail service is the latest in a series of steps the Association has taken to utilize the Internet.

Last year, the Association established a World Wide Web site (www.ncaa.org). The site continually has expanded since then, making a large amount of information about the Association available to both the NCAA membership and the general public.

The national office also regularly has publicized the e-mail addresses of staff members who can answer inquiries about specific topics or issues.

Another service expected to begin operation soon is the use of "listservers," which will permit members of NCAA governance groups to communicate with each other via the Internet.

A listserver is a device through which individuals who are registered (or who "subscribe") as participants in an e-mail group can share (or "post") information with all other subscribers simply by sending that information to a single e-mail address.

The listserver receives such messages and then transmits them to all other subscribers in the group. Group members can post a response to all subscribers in the same fashion or send a private reply to an individual in the group.