Newsletters – not simply a nice-to-have, but a goal-driven, people-focused tool
Internal newsletters are a great tool for companies to inform their staff about happenings in their industry, as well as company strategy and culture. Newsletters should not simply be a collection of available information for the month – good planning, aligned with your company’s strategy or goals, is important for the content, look, when and how often. And to counter a top-down approach, it is also a good idea to ask your employees what they want to see in the newsletters so that it is people-focused, not simply about the people but for the people.
“Customers will never love a company until the employees love it first.”
Simon Sinek
British/American author and marketing consultant.
Write about the stuff that affects their lives
Internal newsletters are primarily aimed at a company’s staff, and sometimes their families and the broader community, providing important messages about things that may affect their lives, be that changes in structure, new technological innovation or procedural changes. Answer the What? Where? When? Why? and How? questions.
You have probably already addressed these in a meeting, but the newsletter confirms and restates known information and informs everyone about things that will affect them.
Tell them what happens elsewhere in the company
Incorporating information from different departments in an organisation can counteract the silo effect, where people from one department don’t know what other departments are doing. It’s also an opportunity to explain and welcome new faces in different departments with photos and a bit of background information.
Tell them so that they’ll READ it
“But we can email this information. Why do we need a separate newsletter?”
Keep in mind that the average office worker receives up to 120 business emails a day (according to the Radicati Group’s Email Statistics Report, 2015-2019). You don’t want the electronic version of the newsletter to disappear in the proverbial haystack, do you? And, of course, not all jobs have continuous email access as part of the package.
Talking about making the newsletter easy to read, don’t go all crazy with different fonts and font sizes. The text should be easy to read and not distract the reader. Choose one type for most of the body of the text and then you could play around a bit with one or two different font types for the headings.
Tell them: ‘It’s fun to work here!’
Internal newsletters are a valuable tool to remind employees of the bigger picture strategies and values of the company, as well as reinforcing company culture, but they don’t have to be dull. Add some humour and give employees a sense of belonging and pride. Celebrate the successes of the company and make people feel that they have contributed to those successes.
Tell them with pictures
Ideally, you want your internal newsletter to be available at regular intervals. It should have a recognisable basic structure and be easy and simple to read, with catchy headlines. Your staff members shouldn’t resent the newsletter as an additional time-consuming task. Also keep in mind that humans are “programmed” to respond to visuals, especially faces of people, so include plenty of those.
And if you can’t be bothered with the detailed conceptualising, writing and graphic design, give Lemonade Hub a call. We use words and visuals to create messages that will resonate with your audience(s).
