The perils of e‐mail communications in nonprofits

Nonprofits typically operate in a multicultural and global environment. Critical to their success is effective communications by their leaders. But effective communications is a challenge as e‐mail has become the medium of choice for communications among most nonprofit executives. Communicating with their culturally diverse stakeholders using the less personal medium of e‐mails could be jeopardized unless nonprofit executives consciously focus on how recipients might decode their message. By understanding the interactions of the linguistic, cultural, and social processes inherent in the encoding and decoding of communications, they can attenuate misunderstandings. Learning from a series of personal and damaging e‐mails experienced by one of the authors in a global nonprofit organization, the authors underline the need to be culturally sensitive in e‐mail communications in a multicultural organization. This article highlights the challenge faced by leaders and managers of nonprofits to be direct yet polite when not communicating face‐to‐face with their stakeholders.