Monday, March 23, 2009

Employee Newsletter: How a Newbie Writer Did It

I was recently hired by a former employer to help draft a monthly newsletter for its employees. Given that I haven't done this sort of project before, how should I go about it?

Thanks to the things I learned when I began my career in a PR agency, I used these questions to guide me: (1) Who are the readers? (2) What is the objective of the newsletter? and (3) What is the best way to write the newsletter to accomplish its objective given the profile of its readers?

The readership of the newsletter consist of twenty- to thirty-something employees of a successful dot-com. As the team continues to grow, communication between the management and the individual team members becomes more difficult. Day-to-day work gets in the way of proper dialogue.

The company, therefore, needed a way to inform the employees of the strategies it employs to grow the business, motivate them to take active part in these strategies and foster their pride and support for the company.

I was given ten-page document containing a laundry list of marketing activities and process improvements and my challenge was to cull pertinent bits of information from that document and organize those bits in a way that will be interesting and relevant to the readers. I won't go into detail about the tedious process of writing and rewriting the draft. I'm just glad that when I submitted the draft, my coordinator said changes, if ever, would be minimal.

Well, I'm hoping this will be the first of many similar projects.

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