  Bulk email is widely used in organizations to communicate messages to
employees. It is an important tool in making employees aware of policies,
events, leadership updates, etc. However, in large organizations, the problem
of overwhelming communication is widespread. Ineffective organizational bulk
emails waste employees' time and organizations' money, and cause a lack of
awareness or compliance with organizations' missions and priorities. This
thesis focuses on improving organizational bulk email systems by 1) conducting
qualitative research to understand different stakeholders; 2) conducting field
studies to evaluate personalization's effects on getting employees to read bulk
messages; 3) designing tools to support communicators in evaluating bulk
emails. We performed these studies at the University of Minnesota, interviewing
25 employees (both senders and recipients), and including 317 participants in
total. We found that the university's current bulk email system is ineffective
as only 22% of the information communicated was retained by employees. To
encourage employees to read high-level information, we implemented a
multi-stakeholder personalization framework that mixed
important-to-organization messages with employee-preferred messages and
improved the studied bulk email's recognition rate by 20%. On the sender side,
we iteratively designed a prototype of a bulk email evaluation platform. In
field evaluation, we found bulk emails' message-level performance helped
communicators in designing bulk emails. We collected eye-tracking data and
developed a neural network technique to estimate how much time each message is
being read using recipients' interactions with browsers only, which improved
the estimation accuracy to 73%. In summary, this work sheds light on how to
design organizational bulk email systems that communicate effectively and
respect different stakeholders' value.
