Best Practices Conference in October

I'm delighted that the Best Practices Conference is shaping up to be as wonderful as the prior eight! We already have over 50 participants signed up, so our spaces are filling up fast. Please remember that we have an early-bird deadline of September 1st for a reduced rate of $185. Sign up at TeachPsych.org.

Project Syllabus: Woot!

I recently ordered a t-shirt from Woot.com. This is the email I received once my order was placed:

Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site! Sit still a minute because you need to know this stuff:

• You're now a registered member of all four of our sites: woot.com, shirt.woot.com, wine.woot.com and sellout.woot.com. Don't be alarmed. We'll explain more later.


• Typical orders take up to 5 business days to ship from our warehouse (except for overnight t-shirt orders). If you order an item during peak times like a Woot-Off, it can take a little longer. Once we ship it, delivery time to your door depends on FedEx or SmartPost.


• Once the item ships out, you can access your tracking data by going to Your Account and clicking on the order number. If you have a problem receiving your order, or you receive the wrong item, contact service@woot.com.


• If you receive your item and it doesn't work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk. Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact service@woot.com and we'll grudgingly provide some further assistance.


• If you receive your item and decide you don't like it, take it to eBay or pawn it off on one of your so-called friends. We don't want it, either.

That goes for Woot.com and all of the sites in the Woot.com family. There's some specific stuff you might want to know about each of the others. And here it comes now.

Shirt.woot - Check the size chart, check the size chart, check the size chart. It's at the bottom of the product description for each sale. If you order the wrong size, we won't take it back - your only option is to gain or lose weight so it fits, possibly including painful, costly cosmetic surgery. If you want your overnight order the next day, place it by noon Central time. International orders generally take about 3-4 weeks to arrive. If you think your one-year-old can design a better shirt, encourage your one-year-old to enter the Derby, our weekly design competition. That $1,000 prize can buy a lot of Binkies.
http://shirt.woot.com/derby/
http://shirt.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Wine.woot - First, don't get your hopes up: wine orders can only be shipped to certain states, so read the entire list of eligible states before you print up the invitations to your wine party and place your order. Ineligible orders will be cancelled and refunded. If you do complete your order and receive the tracking data, make sure you give it some time to update. It won't be uncommon for it to take a little while for real, actual data to show up. You might call the data "late" - we prefer to think of it as "aged". http://wine.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Sellout.woot - Don't be confused or disoriented by the redirect when you visit the site - we just have to run you through Yahoo! Shopping before you come back to Woot turf. It's perfectly normal. You should know that we actually sell things here at times that could partner nicely with items from the regular Woot website, giving you a chance to have your cake and eat it, and then take a bite of another guy's cake when he's not looking, and mmmm...cake...is this email almost over? We're getting hungry. http://sellout.woot.com/WhatIsWoot.aspx

Bear with us a moment more and we can all get on with our lives. If you email service@woot.com, make sure you include your order number and/or username. We'd hate to have to track you down through other, less savory means. And this last bit of information is critical: when you look at your order history and panic because you don't see an order you placed, make sure you are logged into the Woot site you purchased it from. Your Wine.Woot orders won't show up in your order history if you're looking at it on Shirt.Woot, and so on. And you'll be upset, and we'll be upset, and we'll each say things we don't mean, and even though we'll eventually work it all out, things will never be the same between us again.

Last but certainly not least, happy Wooting!

Woot Member Services

You read the whole thing, didn't you?

Like a syllabus, this email provides both an introduction and the rules of engagement. They not only got me to read the entire email, I also found myself ready to do business with them again even though they have some un-customer-friendly policies, e.g., no returns. How did they do it?

Enthusiastic. The company's enthusiasm appears in the very first sentence. "Welcome to the warm embrace of Woot, the first, best, and most hygienic daily deal site!" These are people who clearly enjoy what they're doing. Who wants to deal with a surly company?


Use of humor. By about the third bullet point I was beginning to mentally drift off, and then I got slammed back into consciousness with the fourth bullet: "If you receive your item and it doesn't work, contact the manufacturer first. They made the junk. Let them deal with it. If they turn out to be total tools, contact service@woot.com and we'll grudgingly provide some further assistance." I'm hooked. I know I'm going to stick around until the end. Are you picturing your new academic dishonesty statement? "Students who cheat are total tools."

Written in the first person. By using "we" I get the sense that there is a real, live human being writing this. If so, that means that there's a real, live human being with whom I can communicate if I need something. I feel like we've been introduced.

Easy to read. This email is broken up nicely. There are bullets when bullets are needed. Later paragraphs begin with "shirt.woot," "wine.woot," and "sellout.woot" making it easy to see what they're talking about when.

Clear expectations. The Project Syllabus reviewers have been putting greater emphasis on syllabus tone. When some hear "warmer tone" they may think that means the instructor needs to have lax policies to accommodate every possible student issue. Not at all. This email has a warm tone, generated by humor, but the policies are not lax at all. They are not lax, but they are crystal clear.

Rationale for rules. We know that people are more likely to go along with the rules when they know the reasons for the rules. Woot provides rationales. Why do you have the attendance policy that you do? What's the reasoning behind your late assignment policy? Why are you asking students to do a particular assignment? The reasons may be obvious to you, but they may not be obvious to students.

A syllabus does not need to be a dry read. While the language and style Woot uses may not fit you, I encourage you to use your own voice to put yourself in your syllabus.

[This blog post was based on a symposium titled "Project Syllabus: Best Practices in Syllabus Tone" presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Toronto, Canada, August 2009.]