As a former (and kinda current student), I think I can provide some insight as to the difficulties of getting a students attention via both traditional and new methods.

As an undergraduate at William and Mary prior to the prevalence of cel phones but after the demise of the hall phone, I can say that using voice-mail as a method to communicate with the students may just have had the appearance of being effective. Although it was easy to send a broadcast message to the entire student body, there was little metric to see if the message was received or acted upon. Although I can understand the plight of not having a reliable method to send messages to students, is that the right question to ask? Isn’t the more important question whether the students who receive the messages actually hear and act upon them?

That leads to my second point which deals with your final paragraph: information overload. The shear volume of messages that are sent to students is enormous. As a graduate student living off campus, I don’t receive the bulk of emails that go out to students. I receive a student happenings email twice a week (often with up to 35 entries in it). I also receive at least 2 emails a week from the Graduate Arts and Sciences office plus emails from my department. And all that is before I am looking at anything from my professors. In total, between June 1, 2005 and today, I have nearly 850 messages that relate to W&M, that works out to over 2 emails a day that are related to my schooling. From talking with undergraduates the number is far greater; they receive emails from their RA, their Area Director, Residence Life, the Dean of Students office, as well as many more offices on campus.

I would say that the problem is not that email is not an effective means of communications, but that students have become numb to email from the College as a result of overload. If email is to be the communications mechanism (and I think it must be), the job the College must take on is how to control the quantity and scope of the emails that it sends. Emails need to be targeted to specific audiences so that when a student sees an email from an official W&M address, they feel it will contain something important to them personally instead of just rolling their eyes and reaching for the delete key.