Beyond newsletters: tips for internal communication
Jinfo Blog

By Sarah Dillingham

Abstract

How often have you heard the phrase "we need a newsletter!"? It’s one of the cheapest, easiest and most common ways of disseminating information withinanorganisation, but all too often they sit unread in email inboxes. It is important to carefuly consider a few factors before starting up a newsletter.  

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How often have you heard the phrase “we need a newsletter!”?

It’s one of the cheapest, easiest and most common ways of disseminating information withinanorganisation, but all too often they sit unread in email inboxes.

Reprints Desk, HiveFire and Gilead Sciences shared their tips on how to move “Beyond Newsletters” at a recent webinar.

Before setting up your newsletter, ask yourself:

• Why are you doing it? What’s the business purpose?
• Who’s going to be reading it?
• Who’ll be doing the work in producing it?
• What needs to be in it?
• How are you going to put it together?

Email newsletters can be incredibly useful. They are easy to create and disseminate. Pulling together editorialised content helps your users get straight to the information that they need.

As a recurring medium, email newsletters create an expectation and dependence in the readership. They drive traffic to internet/intranet sites, and are an easy way to push “a single version of the truth” to a large number of people simultaneously.

On the downside, they are transient (read: easily deleted), cannot be amended in real time and do not create a dialogue between an audience and producer.

There are plenty of easy-to-use alternative options to email such as RSS feeds, widgets and web parts, social media and content streaming. Technical ignorance is not an excuse for ignoring more dynamic delivery methods.

With mobile becoming an increasingly ubiquitous communication channel, it is essential to have some understanding of what works across BlackBerry, Android, iPhone and Windows devices, be it a newsletter or another form of consistent communication.

Listen to the webinar to find out more or read the slides.

More useful resources:

Current awareness and alerting aggregation tool Bibliogo (www.bibliogo.com)

Content marketing and curation tool Curata (www.getcurata.com)

FreePint’s FUMSI Report: Folio on Aggregating & Curating Enterprise Content

http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1861)

Four SLA 2011 P&HT Presentations: “Best Practices - News & Newsletter Dissemination” (http://bit.ly/SLA-PHT)

Content Curators group on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3946859)

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