A newsletter is a brilliant way to build trust with the right people, get them involved with your reuse project, and spread the word.

Whether you want staff to adopt reuse and sustainability practices, improve the image of your department, demonstrate procurement value, or shout about your reuse achievements, cultivating an authentic connection using a regular, well-produced newsletter can help you communicate your key messages to the right people. 

Below we explain how to get started with a newsletter, and how it can help reach your behaviour change, culture change, and influence targets.

As a free download at the end you'll get:

• 16 top tips. Don't make the mistakes we did.
• Newsletter strategy plan. Understand where you are going and how to get there.
• Newsletter action plan. Each time you do a newsletter use this action plan to help.

Why bother?

You're probably trying to bring change within your organisation, encourage reuse, and share details of your project successes, and how to get involved. You want to make things better, improve processes, and make your organisation more sustainable.

To do that you need to communicate your objectives in a palatable, persuasive way on a regular basis to as many relevant people as possible. 

People are positively influenced by other people that they know and trust. We have talked about this in the past.

A newsletter is a brilliant way to target your reuse messages and calls to action to those that matter, and cut through the noise of other news from your organisation. If you do it right, it'll require minimum time input for maximum impact.  

Overcome the barriers

It can be an overwhelming, time-consuming process. It can be difficult to decide what to write about and how to find content.

Remember, the overall rule is to inform and entertain. 

To get content that informs and entertains try collecting snippets of information from across your workplace and from your colleagues. Tell their stories. Do on-the-spot interviews. Get a small team to send you content as they go. It will only take five to 10 minutes a day while they browse the web or talk to people across your organisation or department. 

Collect and organise this content into a shared folder. Evernote is great for this. 

At the end of every month or whenever you choose, meet with your team and organise your content into the best and most relevant.

You'll probably end up with too much content for a monthly newsletter, and your hardest job will be to decide what you can leave out.

If you find it's taking you too long to write stuff down, try recording your thoughts in audio on your phone. Send the audio to Rev to get transcribed, and use this as your content base.

Get started!

Choose a newsletter service. If you don’t have access to one in-house, check out Mail Chimp, Hub Spot, Constant Contact or Campaign Monitor, that offer affordable models to create newsletters. 

Mailchimp is probably the easiest out of the services we've tried and it's free for up to 500 subscribers. We use Hub Spot now; it's amazing, but there is a cost.

Build up your contacts. Start collecting email addresses as part of all your processes where you engage with the people you want to influence. When you're hosting or attending events, in meetings, or if people visit your website. A good newsletter service provider will let you insert buttons onto your website, where interested parties can sign up themselves. Be aware of data collection and storage laws.

Design it. Templates are available within most newsletter services. You can include your campaign logo and organisation's brand, colours, contact details, links to your website, and buttons for all your social media channels.

Then have a bit of fun and decide the sections you want to include. This could include reuse tips and tools, the latest news from across the web and your organisation, competitions, interviews, funny videos, feedback from happy reuse users, your latest achievements, and fabulous photographs.

Keep it short and sweet. While a newsletter needs to have substance, your readers must be able to scan it quickly during their busy day. If you’ve got more to say why not write a blog post and link to it from your newsletter?

Grab attention! The most important part of a newsletter is the subject line. Make sure it stands out amongst the dozens of unread emails in the average inbox. Be human. Be funny. If your system allows it, why not personalise it so your reader sees their name calling out to them?

Check, once, check twice, check three times. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, broken links are all pesky irritations for the reader. Always try and get a second and third pair of eyes on it before you press send.

Schedule it and stick to it. Decide on a publishing schedule and stick to it! It’s better to publish less frequently and regularly, than to promise a weekly newsletter and only send once a quarter.

If you don't get it already you can sign up to our newsletter and see our newsletter promise.

Then download:

• 16 top tips. Don't make the mistakes we did.
• Newsletter strategy plan. Know where you are going and how to get there.
• Newsletter action plan. Each time you do a newsletter use this action plan to help.

Good luck and let us know how you get on!