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If you work in government, chances are your agency runs on listservs.
The emails never stop. Reply-all threads spiral. Critical updates get buried. And when you need an answer, you’re stuck digging around your inbox hoping someone asked the same question six months ago.
For many government programs — elections, disaster response, public health — listservs are still the backbone of coordination. And that's the problem.
Listservs date back to around 1985, making them as cutting edge as Blockbuster Video. While some old technologies are tried and true, others stick around past their usefulness — and shift from being a tool to an obstacle.
It’s no secret among public servants that listservs are buckling — and breaking — under the weight of modern, increasingly complex government coordination needs. Our partners in local, state, and federal agencies are ditching listservs for coordination infrastructure that actually helps public servants do their jobs. Because government shouldn’t run on the email equivalent of a hundred-person group chat.
State governments spent about $2.8 trillion in 2023 — so there’s a lot riding on effective government coordination. Using 40-year-old technology to run multimillion dollar agencywide operations is like flying a fighter jet with a paper map — it doesn’t work and it won’t end well.
If they’re so unfit for purpose, why do listservs persist? Listservs are considered a “free” technology because they can be spun up in-house by a knowledgeable IT professional. But the absence of a budget line item hides the high costs of listservs for government programs.
In reality, agencies — and taxpayers — eat the costs of listservs in two significant ways. First, listservs pretend as if notoriously cluttered inboxes can serve as reliable knowledge bases. In a world where workers already spend over a day a week just hunting for information, listservs provide a cluttered attic for scattered information when public servants need an organized library where they can find what they need quickly. For a 1,000-person agency, that's not an inconvenience; it's millions of dollars a year in squandered capacity.
Second, listservs provide the illusion of coordination by equating sending an email with actually aligning partners. In reality, messages aren’t arriving, recipients aren’t reading, updates are missed, and when people do respond, it becomes a noisy reply-all thread. This translates to delayed initiatives, missed deadlines, partners left behind, and leadership flying blind — these aren't edge cases, they're the predictable cost of running government programs off the back of listservs.
For government bodies administering elections, responding to disasters, coordinating public health initiatives, and beyond, the costs are real. Program launches are delayed, partners get left out, SOPs aren’t followed, and everyone gets burned out because more communications doesn’t translate to better coordination.
How can you tell if a listserv is hurting more than helping? Try answering the below 5 questions in the context of your agency’s work. If your answer is no to all of them, listservs are actually getting the job done for you. But if you answer “yes” to 3 or more — then your listserv is holding back coordination and costing agency money in more ways than one.
Do your listserv emails result in reply-all responses? Long reply-all threads are a workplace punchline — but they reflect a genuine need: teams want to share what's working, ask questions, and learn from peers. The problem is that listservs turn peer engagement for some into noise for everyone else. Because follow-up emails are only relevant to a subset of the whole audience, recipients learn to ignore the listserv itself — including updates that actually matter.
Do you see bounced emails each time you send to the listserv? A bounce usually means someone left their role — and their replacement hasn't been added. Keeping a listserv current is a constant administrative burden. And when new members are added, they start with an empty inbox and no context. The newest people in a working group are the ones most likely to fall behind and take longer to contribute.
Do you send attachments over the listserv? The members of a listserv may need information contained in files like PDFs and spreadsheets. The problem with using a listserv is that files get buried in inboxes, becoming hard to find and eventually out of date. Coordination often demands timely information, like the latest policy guidance, a current status, or a standing procedure. This is a job for an institutional knowledge base — a single place to find up-to-date information.
Do you use multiple listservs with overlapping membership? Segmenting by group makes sense. But when the same people appear across multiple listservs, they get repeat messages — and they learn to ignore them. Over time, redundancy trains your most important recipients to tune out.
Do you lack visibility into who reads your email? Leaders know the sinking feeling of a follow-up that should never have been necessary. Time spent asking “did you get my message?” is time away from moving operations forward. Listservs give you no visibility into who's reading, who's acting, and who's already behind — which means gaps don't surface until they're already causing problems. Effective coordination requires more than sending an email and hoping for the best.
For agencies answering “yes” to more than 2 of the above, listservs aren’t just a pain. They cost agency time, reduce communication effectiveness, and hurt public servants’ ability to move initiatives forward.
So how can agencies actually get everyone on the same sheet of music, singing the same tune, and driving real coordination? Based on conversations with hundreds of public sector partners, we think coordination infrastructure should provide:
Roundtable was made for this — literally. Our agency partners use Roundtable because it was built alongside public servants and helps them move the mission forward.
To keep running your operations with Blockbuster era technology, you’re good to go.
To see what modern government coordination looks like — reach out.
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