# The cost of e-mail

- Link: https://fundraising.co.uk/1998/12/21/cost-email/
- Published: 1998-12-21T00:00:00+00:00
- Author: Howard Lake

**E-mail can certainly help to reduce administration costs, but it does carry cost
implications itself. Webspace magazine this month reports that this figure can become
quite high. **

“Anecdotally it costs a company £5 to answer an inbound e-mail which can take up
to 12 minutes to understand and sort out an appropriate reply to, and up to £12 
if a supervisor gets involved.” While those figures are unlikely to apply to charities,
it is important to consider the costs involved in answering supporters’ e-mail enquiries.

If it ever gets too much one of the top-end solutions to managing large quantities
of e-mail is Brightware, which uses intelligent agent software to “understand” the
contents of an e-mail message and route it to the correct staff member. More information
from Brightware.

## Advertisement

 * **[Four years of UK Fundraising News e-mail newsletter](https://fundraising.co.uk/2004/01/29/four-years-uk-fundraising-news-email-newsletter/)**(
   29 January 2004)
 * **[Advert > New training course on publishing an e-mail newsletter](https://fundraising.co.uk/2004/06/16/advertgt-new-training-course-publishing-email-newsletter/)**(
   16 June 2004)
 * **[Its all new media isn't it?](https://fundraising.co.uk/2006/03/22/its-all-new-media-isn039t-it/)**(
   22 March 2006)