SPURspectives

What percentage of your newsletter mailing list do you think actually reads your print newsletter? How many people throw it in the trash immediately? How many put it in pile of stuff to look at later - and then forget all about it? How many read one article? Two articles?

Or look at it this way: How many people would miss your newsletter if it didn’t show up? Is anyone actually anticipating its arrival?

While most newsletters are junk mail in the making, most nonprofits are still very attached to the idea of having a newsletter. Perhaps this is because newsletters feel productive and the editorial process is predictable and familiar - you plan it, you write it, you lay it out, you mail it. That’s a cycle that may be hard to abandon, especially if you’ve been doing a newsletter for many years.

But it’s probably time to let go.

Revisiting your newsletter rationale

Your donors and supporters may love you, but that doesn’t mean they love your newsletter. Newsletters aren’t timely, so they rarely contain real news. For the most part, newsletters say the same things again and again. It’s spring, so we’re promoting our fundraising event. It’s the holiday season, so we’re talk about end-of-year giving. The same stuff, cycle after cycle. And your readers know it’s going to be the same stuff.

I asked David Svet, CEO at Spur Communications, what nonprofits should be asking themselves to determine if they really need a print newsletter. He suggested two key questions that get at the heart of the matter:

1.      Do you have an editorial calendar for the next three years? Yes, the calendar will be looser the further forward you look, but if you can’t put together a three-year plan showing how your newsletter is going to support your communication goals or your organization’s mission, you are very likely producing the newsletter equivalent of a brochure - over and over and over.

2.      Does all the content in your newsletter need to be grouped together to be delivered? Very few articles really need to be delivered together to be effective. The newsletter format is a legacy of a time when it was easier and cheaper to bundle all your news items together. These days, printing, paper, and postage are not cheap - making a newsletter a significant cost center for most marketing budgets. Grouping for convenience of delivery just doesn’t make sense anymore.

If you don’t have a long-term editorial plan and don’t have a very good reason for grouping information, it’s time to rethink your newsletter.

Creating a steady flow of information

If you shift the time and money you’ve been putting into a print newsletter to other types of communication, you can create a constant flow of information instead of a cycle of occasional floods.

With social media and 1:1 marketing, you can touch people more often in more meaningful ways. You can invite people to join a conversation, rather than just engaging in one-way communication. You can respect people’s time by customizing the amount of information they get and timing it to fit with their preferences, and you can use variable data to customize the types of information they receive.

This means you can deliver content in highly customized, bite-size chunks that increase readership and engagement. The information and messages you’ve been delivering through your newsletter can be delivered through a combination of online channels, including blogs, Twitter, email, and YouTube. You also want to be sure your website functions as a hub, not an island, so that people can easily connect to you and to each other through all your social networks.

Print still has its place

The permanence of print still has value. You want to use print in your information flow for those things that need to be archived - items that people are most likely to save, share, and look at more than once.

I asked David for his thoughts about this, and he advises that nonprofits should always say thank you in print (and then reinforce it by saying thank you via email and social networks - you can never say thank you too often). He also says that the annual report is another place where print still makes sense because there is definite value in thanking your supporters in ink, on a piece of paper. In addition, the annual report can be a flagship document that functions as a very useful development tool, demonstrating to donors and potential donors where your organization has been and where it’s going.

Finally, if you’re the rare nonprofit that has very good reasons for producing a print newsletter - if you can lay out that three-year plan and have information that should be grouped together to be most effective - you should still revisit what you are doing and find ways to use variable data to customize portions of the newsletter to reflect each reader’s needs and preferences.

Print isn’t dead, but it’s no longer the default choice. The money you put into print communications, including newsletters, should be strategic and thoughtful, not something you do because you’ve always done it that way. For most nonprofits, this means that traditional print newsletters should be a thing of the past.

Tags: junk mail, marketing, newsletter, nonprofit