Managing all the accounts and services that make up your organization's digital presence can be a lot. We register for all kinds of things using our work (and personal) emails: a professional newsletter, a subscription to a personally valuable service like Boomerang or Grammarly, or a networking service. Here are some best practices we recommend to keep the hassle to a minimum.
Non-personal emails
If you're not using non-personal email addresses at work for your must-use, please-never-crash, critical online services, you could run into some very costly issues down the road.
When to use personal vs. non-personal emails
When signing up for services that are critical to running your website, you shouldn't use your personal work or home email (jdoe@nonprofit.org or jdoe@gmail.com) to register. Examples include:
- Your domain name registration, or DNS management systems like Cloudflare
- Your Google Analytics account
- A plugin or theme license purchased from ThemeForest or similar
- Email services (SendGrid, Microsoft Office 365, etc.)
Scenarios
In Cornershop's experience, this issue pops up most often when an employee leaves for another job. If they used a personal non-work email to register for a company-wide account, you now have to track that employee down and hope they're willing to help. If it was their personal work email, but that account has been fully deleted and can't be reactivated (or wasn't redirected; see below), you've hit a dead end with no way to reclaim the account.
Another scenario: your site needs an urgent fix, but the email registered to the broken service belongs to a coworker who's on vacation, off-grid, for a week. Now what?
Whatever keeps you from easily logging into a service that's critical to your organization's web presence, the impact can be costly. You may end up spending a lot of time or money proving ownership, or testing and recreating lost settings.
Consider these policy changes and preventative actions
- Switch existing accounts over to non-personal emails. When you change the email on an account, make sure the employee is available and aware so they can help confirm the changeover.
- When an employee leaves, set up a forward or redirect of their email address. As an added precaution, this lets your staff receive password reset requests and similar emails. None of us are perfect, and it's easy to forget about an account during an exit interview. Most email providers have guides on how to set this up. Here's a good example for Google Workspace.
- Use a secure password vault. Instead of passwords floating around in the open, or tracking updated passwords in a spreadsheet, store important credentials in a password vault like 1Password, Keeper, NordPass, or others. That way your trusted coworkers can get to the shared emails and passwords for your critical services.