Tips to Get Your Employee Newsletter Read
by Cameron Woodworth
Everybody's dealing with information overload these days. Mailboxes are stuffed, e-mail in-boxes are jammed with hundreds of messages, and people are struggling to find the time to wade through important company material. Still, companies need to get information out to their employees. And while e-mail and intranets are becoming more common, employee newsletters are still considered a vital tool in keeping employees informed.
So, how do you make your employee newsletter relevant? How do you make sure it gets read?
It helps to have a sense of humor. MicroNews often contains irreverent and iconoclastic features, a reflection of Microsoft's company culture, says editor Mario Juarez. MicroNews runs the Dilbert comic strip, offers an annual parody issue, and features frequent "chicken articles" about the collection of hens and roosters that have made their home around "Lake Bill" on the Microsoft campus for the past five years. The 12-page MicroNews, which is delivered to 27,000 employees once a week, also contains a 12-page classified ads insert, a feature popular among Microsoft employees. These features help encourage people to read the newsletter.
"We find that many of them take it home on Friday night and spend 10 or 30 minutes on Saturday morning reading it over a cup of coffee," says Juarez.
By drawing people into the newsletter with interesting features, Microsoft makes sure that people see the really important stuff like product announcements, release dates and company goals. Recently, a special edition of MicroNews focused on the Department of Justice case against Microsoft.
Juarez thinks a good newsletter should focus on the strategic issues facing the company as well as the nuts-and-bolts details of topics that affect peoples' lives. "I think they should try to fly closer to the ground," he says. "They should include really useful, baseline information, such as what's new on the cafeteria menu or when enrollment opens."
Charles Gadzik edits Weyerhaeuser Today, a 12-page quarterly distributed to 40,000 employees and 20,000 retirees. "As much as possible, try to connect the newsletter to the lives of the audience by having a really good understanding of what's relevant to their work," he suggests. "If we're running a story having to do with a corporate initiative, we show how that initiative plays out at the plant level."
Gadzik thinks employee newsletters need to focus more on things that are happening outside the company, and how those events and trends affect employees. "We need to help them understand what our competitors are doing, what's driving product sales, and how economic forces are impacting the workplace."
Jerri Etchason, editor of Seafirst's newsletter, Northwest News, says, "We really focus on helping employees fit themselves into the big picture." The eight-page tabloid comes out twice a month and is read by 11,000 employees in four states. "Employees really appreciate it when we share information on corporate strategies."
Northwest News strives for "peer-level" communication, Etchason says. "We use people's first names, and we stay away from using formal titles, like vice president. That's irrelevant, although we may identify them by saying that they manage such-and-such a division. It's an effort to make every person feel that they're important to the company."
Etchason also stresses the importance of maintaining high writing and design standards. "You owe that to the reader," she says.
"Clever writing is important," adds Juarez. "It's important to be able to take something that's 1,500 words long and pare it down to 400 words while retaining the essence of the article. Care about the craft."
[Source: IABC/Seattle chapter newsletter.]
