Is the Newsletter Obsolete?

What does an effective newsletter look like in the 21st century?

Who are you? What is your role? What’s your congregation like? What’s your newsletter like?

◦ How frequently is it published?◦ How many pages?◦ How is it reproduced?◦ How many copies are distributed?

Introductions

What's your congregation's biggest challenge?

Newsletter Context

Why do you have a congregation? Why does it exist? What is its mission and purpose?

Back up to basics

Why do you have a church newsletter???

How does it contribute to fulfilling the mission and purpose of your congregation?

Form follows function

Are you writing for insiders or outsiders? How can you tell the difference?

◦ In the average ELCA congregation, 29.5% of baptized members attend worship on any given Sunday. (ELCA Office of Research & Evaluation)

Are you writing for Margaret, or for the other 70.5% of your congregation?

Are you writing for Margaret, or addressing your congregation’s mission & challenges?

Who is your “Margaret?”

The average U.S. household received 22 pieces of mail each week (USPS Postal Facts 2012)

Much mail is ignored (Direct Marketing Association 2010)

◦ Mail sent by companies to “contact list” households gets a response rate of 3.42 %

◦ Mail sent by companies to “prospect list” households gets only a 1.38 % response

Weekday newspaper circulation is dropping at the rate of 9% per year (Audit Bureau of Circulations 2010)

Your newsletter’s competition

Readership Institute studies at the Star Tribune conducted with a total of 340 young adults in the Twin Cities in 2005.

Show that both hard news and advertising can engage readers when tailored to the interests and perceived needs of the audience.

Turning the tide

Select news items to reflect subject matter of interest to the target audience

Reframe and rewrite stories to get at “why this matters to you”

Write shorter, clearer narratives Explain complicated concepts in visual rather

than narrative form Pull out details that clog narrative flow and

craft them into separate components Write active headlines that speak directly to

readers and their experiences

Techniques:

Often, our newsletter is essentially advertising upcoming events

Which marketing campaign do you think would get better results:◦ the one that contacts 100 customers one time, or◦ the one that contacts 25 customers four times?

Advertisers generally assume that a message must be seen 6-8 times before being retained.

Reach vs. Frequency

More Competition

What we do online

88% of U.S. adults own a cell phone of some 55% use their phone to go online

◦ (up from 31% as recently as April 2009) Moreover, 31% of these current cell internet

users say that they mostly go online using their cell phone, and not using some other device such as a desktop or laptop computer.

That works out to 15% of all adults who are “cell-mostly internet users”◦ And increasing rapidly!

Pew Research, June 2012

This?

Or this?

Or even this?

Other than Margaret, people are reading your newsletter less and spending less time with it than before.

They are looking for news tailored to their needs, not those of the institution.

They are looking for news and information online rather than in print.

They want their online news and information in small “tweets” that fit on their phones.

Frequent repeats are necessary for retention.

We can conclude that…

Old media never die◦ …but they change in function and form.

So what should a 21st century newsletter look like?

So is the newsletter dead?

Other than Margaret, people are reading your newsletter less and spending less time with it than before.

They are looking for news tailored to their needs, not those of the institution.

They are looking for news and information online rather than in print.

They want their online news and information in small “tweets” that fit on their phones.

Frequent repeats are necessary for retention.

We can conclude that…