A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results

The objective of this book is to help you manage a newsletter. Anyone can produce a newsletter, but an effective newsletter, one that serves your needs and those of the people with whom you communicate, takes more than a set of writing and designing skills. It takes knowledge of management; more specifically, the art and science of newsletter management.

It's art because it taps your creativity to develop effective strategies and tactics. Yes, we normally associate creativity with the writing and designing of newsletters, but a creative mind is equally important in managing for maximized value, particularly when developing strategy and tactics.

It's science in the sense that we want to publish effective newsletters based on a body of methodically arranged knowledge, not guesswork. When I began working on this book, the state of newsletter science was more or less summed up in the phrase "Write for your readers." Good advice, but far too vague when you sit down to work on a newsletter.

A Manager's Guide to Newsletters: Communicating for Results gives you this knowledge, along with the tools and instruction you need to plan and publish, without guessing what it means to "Write for your readers." It deals with the practical issues involved in publishing a newsletter that serves your needs and the needs of the people with whom you want to communicate.

Taken together, the art and science of newsletter publishing add up to a system for publishing newsletters, newsletters that influence readers and improve results.

Here, you'll find useful advice that helps you create or refocus a newsletter: advice that leads you step-by-step through the management issues. You'll find out:

+ Whether a newsletter is the right medium for your purposes
+ How to express your objectives as reader responses
+ How to understand and meet reader needs
+ How to select content that serves your needs and reader needs
+ How to present that content
+ How to decide on frequency (how often to publish) and number of pages

In addition, a section on administration provides information on managing a newsletter once it's being published regularly. And a section on evaluation will help you assess how well your newsletter is performing.

As you may have surmised by now, this is not a book about writing, editing, desktop publishing, or newsletter design. A number of other books cover those topics, and cover them well. I recommend that you buy at least one of them if you plan to be a hands-on publisher. But before writing or designing, be sure you've covered the management issues, planning, administration, and evaluation.

While the book should help anyone responsible for a newsletter, I wrote it with managers, owner managers, and administrators in mind. But that doesn't limit its usefulness. Anyone responsible for newsletter publishing, including newsletter editors, can apply the principles described here.

In the same vein, the book addresses issues from the perspective of a large organization, rather than a small one. For example, I've assumed that one set of managers determines the mission, another decides on the objectives of departments, a third manages the newsletter, and a separate staff of journalists does the actual editorial and publishing work. You, on the other hand, may own a small business and be responsible for all those roles, and wondering whether this book has any relevance for you. It does. The principles and applications described here should be relevant to any organization, including small ones. The processes will be different, obviously, but the issues will be the same.