The Future Is Now for Electronic Newsletters
March 15, 2009
Ah for the good old days, when a group of congregants would get together and fold and address a few hundred church newsletters, then lug them down to the post office. And wait two days for everyone to receive them. And then two weeks or a month later do it again.
That way of doing things has changed for many, perhaps most, congregations as the printed newsletter has given way to an electronic one. These days a majority of congregations seem to have their newsletters posted electronically, either by email distribution or posted to the church website, although most still print a few copies for those without access to computers and for Sunday morning visitors.
There are many good reasons for making this switch—saving money, saving trees, saving time, getting news into the hands of readers earlier, the ability to do a newsletter in color and to make last-minute changes and make corrections more promptly. Some might say it is eminently more findable—always there on the computer—rather than buried under a stack of paper on the corner of the desk.
“My feeling is that most congregations are providing their newsletter electronically now,” says Barb Brown, who until recently was newsletter editor at the Emerson Unitarian Universalist (UU) Chapel in Ellisville, MO (87 members), a St. Louis suburb. The Chapel’s newsletter went electronic several years ago.
The big question for church leaders is whether readers are staying as connected and informed with an online newsletter as with a printed one. Brown, who is comoderator of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA)-sponsored email list UU-editors, for newsletter editors, notes, “After listening to other editors and to congregants at annual meetings, going electronic hasn’t really changed how much or little people read the newsletter. Some people read all of it and some simply read the parts in which they are interested, whether it’s in black and white on a printed page, or really nice full color on the computer screen.”
Consider this when going electronic:
- Leave no one behind. Continue to mail print copies to those who can’t access an online newsletter and keep some on hand on Sunday morning.
- Delete personal “joys and sorrows” and personal contact information from online newsletters or post it in a password-protected area of the website.
- Send it as a PDF (Portable Document Format), which is a universal file format that most all computer users have the ability to access.
- Keep the size of the electronic files small so that people with older, slower computers can receive them.
The newsletter of the 247-member First Unitarian Church of Toledo, OH, went electronic in October, primarily so that it could add color, graphics, and better photos. “We had a perfectly good newsletter before, but we think people nowadays expect to see content presented in a more visually interesting manner than black and white,” says Allan Brown, a member of the church’s communications group. “We were also wanting to celebrate our new building and our new minister, Beth Marshall.” The newsletter design is coordinated with the church’s new business cards and letterhead.
Judith Ramey, director of communications for the Unitarian Church of Evanston, IL (410), says the church’s newsletter is posted using the PDF format. For a time it was also posted in the body of email messages in a format called “Plain Text.” We eliminated that because it required a lot of staff time to do that and as an editor, I thought it lacked appeal,” she says.
Use caution when going electronic, says Paul Riedesel, former communications chair at First Universalist Church in Minneapolis, MN (801). “I don’t doubt that 20- and 30-somethings strongly prefer electronic communications, but feel no less strongly that any push to go all-electronic would be a communications disaster for most congregations. The bigger the congregation, the greater the need for systematic communication.”
For more information contact interconnections @ uua.org.
Last updated on Tuesday, March 3, 2009.
