Newsletters remain a cornerstone of internal communication in healthcare organizations. Striking the balance between the need to deliver accurate information, updates and must-read content with the need to provide a voice of staff, volunteers, and partners in your newsletter can be difficult. Writing, creating and getting approval on each piece of content is time consuming so you want to ensure your audiences read and engage with your newsletter.
Here are some tips on sourcing and creating engaging content:
- Conduct an audit of your content. Create a list of the existing content available to you from across the organization. This can reduce the amount of new content you need to create. Potential content repositories include external and internal websites, blogs, organizational research, internal social networks, industry related news, internal events, CSR campaigns, training news, Health and Safety programs to name a few.
- Create content a brand/style/tone guideline for your newsletter. By defining a set of brand, style and tone of voice guidelines you can ensure the consistent quality of each of your articles. Sharing these guidelines with other team members and contributors can reduce the amount of time and effort spent rewriting and editing.
- User-generated content. Invite employees, volunteers, partners and senior leaders to contribute to your newsletter regularly. Provide them with your newsletter guidelines and a word count.
- Create a publication schedule. Having regular sections such as news round ups and employee spotlights within an employee newsletter is a great way to organize what you are presenting. Set out the content you will cover on a quarterly and monthly basis and ensure that they align to the organization’s overall goals e.g. do they link communications to recent mergers, partnerships, change programs etc.
- Add Rich Media. You know the old adage that a picture paints a thousand words? Well for video you can multiply that by 10. Melcrum research found 54% of employees expect and want to see business videos. Adding imagery and video will draw their eye and they allow your audience to get the information they need. Remember keep it simple, videos don’t have to be high cost or hollywood standard to have the impact you want.
- Design for impact. Remove all barriers to your content by ensuring your newsletter template provides a good reader experience. Ensure your template is aligned to your company branding and is visually appealing so that it stands out in the inbox. Also, make sure the newsletter can be read on the devices used by employees whether that is on large screens or mobile devices.
- Set goals. Set key performance indicators (KPIs) and select metrics that will measure your success. Track important metrics such as open rates, clicks, content popularity (least and most), the number of articles people read and the devices people use to read the newsletter. Analyze your results across your organization by department, job role, etc.