A weekly updates e-mail newsletter

In previous conversations (and the one I just had with @claus) it came up that it might be highly valuable if we send out a weekly update about what is happening in SCORE to everyone interested, also non-community members perhaps or just the initial contact people spreadsheet.

This email should be highly structured to make it easy for us to format it. I suggest we make a template with some clear sections that are easy to fill in every week which we can copy-pasta and fill it in. For now it can probably be mostly community conversations, and later project ‘wins’ and mistakes.

Does this fit into the communications strategy?

Indeed, I was planning on launching a newsletter later on, but starting it now is also an option - just difficult to get an overview. I can be editor and publisher if info is gathered. Perhaps Monthly is enough? Or biweekly?

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To me, the primary aim of this newsletter would be to show to our current collaborators that there is movement and momentum in the project. Perhaps it is also fine if one week the points are not too fancy, I bet we can come up with 5 good points (wins/learnings) per week. These can come from the community or from projects as well.

Ok, lets try it then. Do you want to go all the Mailchimp way or just start of with a simple, editable google docs then being put out on the website?

Hola!

Regarding the newsletter I was thinking:

1. Is it aimed internally within the partners in the project or externally? Boris, when you say current collaborators who are you then thinking off?

2. If it’s externally then maybe aim for a lower frequency than biweekly - montly or even every quarter. In my experince it’s always an ekstra task managing a newsletter - and it can easiliy stress.

but all in all I think we should be really clear with who should receive this newsletter and the purpose. Sorry, Boris, if I am asking some questions which you already have described. It is just not completly clear for me what you mean

Just some observations if I may which relate to @michelle 's post.

1. If there is a lot of content to publish then the task can be seen as onerous and doesn’t happen - we’re all too busy
2. If there isn’t much content and we have committed to a frequent newsletter, then the lack of content might be embarrassing.

So basically it’s all about balancing the frequency of publication with the amount of content

Dear All,
I’ve talked to North Sea Region website and communications master Sofie Forfang, who, regarding news updates reminded me that we are indeed obliged to keep updated the project on the Interreg website. So I think it would be easiest if project updates came to me by way of mail from respective partners’ representatives, for me to then edit into a newslist on the website. We could also have an internal newsletter and I could excerpt from that whatever is relevant for the website. What do you think?

Hey Marie, great work!

Since we’re doing most of our work on the community do you think it might be possible for now to just send a (bi)weekly mail of what is happening in the community, what the plans are and where things are going, that way you don’t need to get any input from anyone and people can post the things they want to tell the world

This means that the way of making the newsletter might be scouring the community for stories like a journalist and then just making a nice list of it.

What do you think of that idea?

I think a regular update newsletter sounds like a good idea, though I still think biweekly is way too often, and would opt for monthly.

I think the easiest way to do this would be to create a google drive doc with space to fill in for each WP lead / partner, on what is going on, new findings and other development. This should have a deadline which I shall rigorously execute each month, and then I will piece something together for the final newsletter to go on the SCORE website. I don’t know of any other format that would be optimally suited for that much input from different people. Mailchim would be for later, external newsletter, right?
Best,
Marie

I see quite some risk with the google doc approach - a) it’s hard to get periodic updates from a large amount of people (without clear incentive for them), b) the input with vary wildly, some being decontextualised cryptic rough notes c) the effort/time invested becomes instantly obsolete, leading to many dormant documents.

I would stay as close to the source as possible and use the community to source content - a) people will be providing updates here (with incentive of collaboration and project progress) , b) updates will be contextualised and (hopefully) informative/actionable, c) effort/time invested remains ‘alive’ and ‘active’

Yes, I’ve been discussing it with @Boris, and those were also the reasons for not going that way. I’ve tried to piece something together for a first newsletter - its linked to already in my post from this morning, but here you are:

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1RRCwnEstv4SvX_9J1zKDDVeq8QnpXvPR

One of my main challenges regarding updates, is that I would like to talk to each work group “lead”, if there is a such, in order to understand what they are actually working on. from then on, i think i have a better chance of following the discussions in the communty.

Hi all, I agree with the two questions @michelle has put forward:

If this is an internal newsletter, what’s the added value next to Monthly calls, bi+multilateral calls and what’s happening on SCORE.community? Are there partners already actively flagging the lack of information?