Every chair has sent the email. It goes to all faculty, it explains that accreditation is coming, and it asks people to upload their materials to a shared drive. A few people respond. Most do not. Two weeks later the same email goes out with the word reminder at the front.
It is easy to read this as apathy. It is usually something more ordinary.
The request is addressed to the wrong person
An email to twenty two people asking for materials is an email to nobody. A faculty member who already submitted their CV reads it and concludes it does not apply to them. A faculty member who has not submitted reads it and cannot tell whether it applies to them either, because it does not say.
The fix is uncomfortable but simple. Send the request only to the people who owe something, and name what they owe.
Hi Marcus, we still need your current CV and the Fall 2026 syllabus for FIN 4310. Both should take about ten minutes. The link goes straight to your upload page.
That message gets answered. The all faculty version does not.
The cost is unknown, so it is assumed to be high
When someone cannot tell how long a task will take, they assume it will take a while and put it after the things they can estimate. Saying that a request takes ten minutes moves it out of the someday pile.
It also helps to be honest when a task is genuinely large. If you need a faculty member to reconstruct three years of rubric results, say so, and give them more than a week.
The reason is missing
Faculty are asked for a lot of things by a lot of offices. A request that explains what the document is for gets more cooperation than one that does not. It does not need a paragraph. One clause is enough.
Compare a request for your CV against a request for your CV so we can show the review team that the program is taught by qualified faculty. The second one is the same amount of work and a different amount of willingness.
The submission path is too long
If the request ends with instructions to log into a portal, navigate to a folder, and follow a naming convention, a portion of your faculty will not finish. Every step between the email and the upload loses people.
Aim for one click from the message to the place where the file goes, with the naming handled for them.
The reminders never stop
The fastest way to teach faculty to ignore your emails is to keep sending them after they have complied. If someone submits and still gets the reminder, they learn that the reminders carry no information. Make sure that completing the task actually ends the messages.