PIO FORUM

by Dennis Meredith

Dennis Meredith

Reaching Out with E-Newsletters

It's not necessarily true that if you build it-your news Web site-they will come. The hard truth is that you can create the most elegant Web site ever, and unless you do active marketing and outreach, you likely will not get the traffic you expected.

An e-mail newsletter is the most productive and cost-effective way to reach out to your audiences. It's easy to produce and distribute, can be made self-subscribing, and requires no printing or snail-mailing.

Stanford discovered the value of its monthly newsletter @Stanford, which is marketed mainly to alumni, when they surveyed recipients. The survey revealed that recipients had a more positive perception of the university and felt more connected to the university. And in fact, the study found newsletter subscribers gave more money to the university.

The Stanford experience emphasizes that even though you may concentrate on reaching journalists, they shouldn't be considered your sole audience of a PIO. You should also aim your e-mail newsletters at alumni, donors, corporate partners, parents, prospective students, and anybody else who might be interested in your institution.

The first step in developing an e-mail newsletter is to (sorry!) form a committee. Enlist people from throughout your institution who want to reach their audiences and work with them to create and market the newsletter. Such a broad base will ensure that the newsletter serves many constituencies effectively and is widely advertised.

First, develop an editorial plan. News from your institution will certainly be the most important content, and your newsletter might be just a periodic compilation of news releases. Cornell offers separate e-mail lists for different categories of news releases, as well as a weekly digest.

You might also want to create versions of newsletters tailored for different constituencies-say for science writers a research newsletter, and for corporate partners a newsletter with both news of research and corporate collaborations. Consider including personal messages from your institution's leaders to specific audiences, such as parents. Such personalization helps build a rapport with your subscribers.

While an editor can assemble such tailored newsletters, the latest technowrinkle in newsletters is a fully customizable system that enables a recipient to choose from an array of topics. Good examples of customizable newsletter systems are those of the New York Times online and the Individual.com news service.

Here are some other editorial guidelines for newsletters:

• Keep the text brief and tightly edited, which means having it written by an experienced writer and not by a student intern. Interns don't know the political subtleties of your institution, which may dictate including one story and not another.
• Use plain ASCII text, so the newsletter loads quickly and is compatible with all e-mail systems. Some e-mail newsletters, such as the Times, do offer an HTML option that includes graphics. For text, include a hard line break every 60 characters, so the text won't wrap jaggedly.
• Use lines of asterisks or other characters, all caps, dashes and white space to separate stories and other elements to make the text easily scannable.
• Write a specific subject line and date for each issue, so recipients will know that it's a new issue.
• Put a URL to news or relevant other sites at the top, so recipients can jump right to the sites.
• Keep all URLs short. If they are more than 80 characters, some e-mail systems will insert a line break, rendering them non-functional.
• List headlines at the top, so recipients can decide whether they want to scroll further.
• The text body should consist of headlines followed by brief story summaries and links to the full text on your site. That full-text story should also include links to your news site or other relevant sites.
• Include at the bottom of the newsletter a contact name, phone number, e-mail address and physical address, and invite comments.

To see how commercial newsletters are structured, check out the E-newsletters Web site, which lists hundreds of newsletters. Also, the E-zineZ site offers useful information on how to publish e-newsletters.

Once you have an editorial plan, the next step is to figure out what software to use. There are many e-mail programs, all of which seem to do a good job. Cornell uses ListProc, and many other institutions use Majordomo as the basis for institution-wide e-mail newsletter services. Commercial software and mailing services include ListSERV, ListBuilder, Postcast, and SparkList. There are also free services such as Topica, but they require that the newsletters carry ads.

Frankly, while I don't have enough experience to recommend one piece of software over another, my impression is that ListPROC and Majordomo may not offer the automation features that the commercial systems do. And, a major piece of advice from Cornell News Service's Web manager, Bill Steele, is to automate as much as possible.

Next, of course, you want to lure subscribers and keep them. Is it appropriate to simply send the newsletter to everybody on your mailing lists? Some see this practice as unwanted spamming, while others point out that institutions such as universities have a special relationship with their constituencies. Therefore, an unsolicited university newsletter is not as annoying as one received from Acme Widgets. I tend to favor initially sending sample newsletters to all potential subscribers, with information on how to subscribe if they wish. Stanford sends its newsletter to all alumni, and the university doesn't seem to have received significant complaints.
Other circulation and policy tips:

• Invite recipients to pass the newsletter along to others.
• Advertise the newsletter(s) prominently on all appropriate Web pages and in print materials.
• Post a sample newsletter on your Web site, so people can see what they'll be receiving.
• Tell subscribers how often they can expect to receive a newsletter. E-newsletter experts say that the minimum frequency is monthly, lest subscribers forget that they subscribed. I'm sure daily is too frequent.
• Post a privacy policy that reassures subscribers that their e-mail addresses will not be used for any other purpose. However, subscriber information might be useful to your own development people. (If Bill Gates subscribes to an environmental research newsletter, that could give my fundraisers invaluable information about his interests.)
• Include information in the newsletter on how to subscribe and unsubscribe, and make it easy to do so.
• Use a "double opt-in" subscribing system, in which no one can be added until he/she has responded to a confirming e-mail message.
• When someone unsubscribes, drop them a note asking if they'd be willing to share the reasons why. You might get some good ideas for improving the newsletter.
• Archive past issues in a searchable form.

I hope these ideas help and that you'll share your experiences with me for a future column.

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Dennis Meredith is director of the Office of Research Communications at Duke University. He can be reached at dennis.meredith@duke.edu or 919-681-8054. He welcomes comments and topic suggestions for future columns.