How to create and disseminate newsletters of a professional or business association?
A newsletter is a digital publication that is distributed via email with a certain frequency (daily, weekly, monthly, bimonthly or quarterly). Newsletters are usually made up of different articles of interest or news of interest to the association’s subscribers.
At Rabuso we manage several business associations through which we send different types of newsletters. For this we use the wordpress plugin called MailPoet.
The main purpose of this plugin is to make it easier for bloggers or blog editors to organise, manage and automate tasks on the blog in which they write.
Within the different types of newsletters we can classify them as follows:
- General: this brings together in a single newsletter all the relevant information of an entity for a specific month or period. Anyone interested can subscribe to receive this information.
- Activity or event: promotes a specific event, which may be organised by the organisation itself or by an external organisation. It is sent to people interested in the subject.
- Special: highlights other projects that are not events, such as publications, studies or other actions.
- Private: When it affects specific people about confidential or internal information of the association.
Guidelines for the creation of a newsletter
- Before starting with the elaboration and design of the newsletter, it is necessary to have carried out two previous steps:
- Publish the contents on the website of the association. In this way, the text/image/button of the newsletter can be linked to the corresponding page or entry to expand on the information included in the newsletter. This allows the user to access the content they are interested in on the association’s website quickly and conveniently from their email.
- Create a list of subscribers to whom the newsletter should be sent, or a database of potential subscribers interested in the information we want to communicate.
- It is advisable to inform the members of the association or related company that they can send information of their own interest to be included in the newsletter.
- In order to start with its elaboration, an editorial meeting is held to discuss and establish the contents to be included.
- Update all the information on the website in case anyone wants more information.
- Once all the contents have been created and reviewed, a draft is created.
- The draft is revised, especially the dates of events, breaking news, etc.
- Once the previous step has been carried out, the appropriate corrections are made and it is reviewed again.
- Finally, schedule the mailing to subscribers.
- Although it may seem that the sending and sending is already finished, this is not the case, it is necessary to review the emails, possible doubts, unsubscriptions, etc.
AEDED Newsletter
In order to organise the work in advance, we make an annual planning of the general or public newsletters which, in case of any changes, will be adapted. In addition, special or thematic newsletters are scheduled on a weekly basis according to the latest news or planned activities.
In the case of AEDED, the general newsletter is sent every two months with the latest news, events, publications, members, etc., that are new to the association or related to its members.
To highlight the information we follow a scheme or template that is composed of:
- A news item highlighted in a larger size with the latest news of the association or its latest project.
- Several news items below the highlighted one, ordered according to the relevance of their content and differentiated by their size.
- We include the latest publications or videos uploaded to the website or of a member.
- To complete the information we include new members of the association and meetings or calendar events.
All these news items are linked to the website where you can find more information about it, as well as previous news, publications, events, consultation forms,…
It is also advisable to include a more visual advertising block about an association event, webinar or publication.
