Association executives often face the question of whether to list their staff email addresses online, but the decision may not be as simple as it seems, depending on your organization.

On the surface, publishing staff or departmental emails may seem like a no-brainer. Associations connect people, and, for many organizations, creating a personal relationship with members is an essential element of their brand. However, there are some downsides related to listing individual addresses.

Spammers. They may "scrape" email addresses from your site, subjecting your organization, its staff, and members to spam. Programs are constantly scanning websites looking for this information.

Recruiters. Headhunters and other recruiters often peruse websites looking for potential candidates for jobs at similar organizations—possibly with your competitors.

Scammers. Increasingly, malicious individuals visit websites to gather information to launch a fraud attempt. This risk is not limited to gathering email addresses. In many cases, they evaluate a site to get the names of key personnel—for example, the executive director—and try to determine when they are traveling. Scammers then send an email appearing to come from this person requesting a wire transfer to cover travel or business-related expenses. The message looks credible, and, if the organization does not have strong controls, it can quickly lose thousands. This is not a theoretical risk: This fraud is being perpetrated on nonprofits regularly.

Like scammers, other malicious players may gather contact information from websites to attempt to dupe employees or members into turning money over or simply to harass or embarrass them—by making a false debt collection attempt, for example.

Spotty customer service. If a member or business partner emails a staff person directly based on a web listing, it could come at a time when that person is out of the office or otherwise unavailable, and so the sender gets no response. Although there may be a good reason that the email went unanswered, the member or partner has had a bad experience with the association.

Associations connect people and, for many organizations, creating a personal relationship with members is an essential element of their brand. However, there are some downsides related to listing individual email addresses.

Staff turnover. Employees come and go in most organizations, and online contact lists may not be updated regularly. Again, site visitors may reach out to people who are no longer on staff and fail to get a response.

Potential Solutions

Those are the risks. What can nonprofits do to mitigate them?

Hide in plain sight. One way this issue can be addressed is through obfuscation methods. These leave the email links still clickable, but the programs used to search for addresses often can't recognize them.

Many content management systems support this feature directly, through plug-ins, or by generating forms that visitors can use to send an email. This has the advantage of protecting against email harvesting while keeping a personal touch for members.

Adopt departmental emails. Many organizations use a hybrid approach: They list individuals but use generic, departmental email addresses. Usually these are distribution lists within an association's email system; the lists can be updated as needed without changing anything on the website. This approach has the advantage of letting the organization monitor incoming requests from members and others while maintaining a level of personalization.

Form-based email. These systems collect structured information about the communication—for example, a drop-down list of topics—and route the request to the appropriate department. Additionally, these systems often are integrated with an organization's membership database or customer relationship management system and keep a record of the correspondence. The disadvantage is that that this approach feels less personal.

Create biography pages. An option that can be combined with other methods is creating a page for each staffer where his or her email is displayed. This won't stop recruiters from gathering the information, but they'll have to work harder to collect your full staff list. Generally, this is only recommended for the purpose of sharing a biography, not protecting against email harvesting.

Giving members and business contacts the opportunity to connect directly with staff helps establish strong relationships despite the potential cost. Still, by implementing one or more of these tactics, association executives and IT professionals can leverage many of the advantages of direct online communication while limiting potential risks.