Digital newsletters can provide a steady stream of fresh content for your intranet, communicate leadership’s vision, highlight your company values, create visibility across silos and spotlight employees. Tribe has created monthly newsletters for clients in technology, manufacturing, financial and other industries.
By setting up a thoughtful framework and editorial plan, you can standardize much of the work of developing each issue — making it imminently manageable to create digital publications that can help employees stay engaged and connected.
To streamline the development of a weekly, monthly or quarterly digital magazine or newsletter, and keep from reinventing the wheel for each issue, we recommend these five tactics:
Establish an editorial framework of articles that will appear in each issue of your digital newsletters. You might decide you’ll always have a leadership piece, manager roundtable, employee spotlight, DEI feature and a bucket that covers wellness, volunteerism and sustainability. For every issue, you’ll just fill each of those buckets with applicable topics and people.
Developing each issue around a theme makes it easy to figure out what to put in each of those buckets. You might consider featuring each of the company values or the four pillars of your business strategies. Other themes we’ve used for digital newsletters include innovation, continuous improvement, leadership development, and a customer-centric focus.
Employees want to hear from the CEO and the other execs at the top of the corporate ladder. But include leaders working a rung or two below as well. These sorts of publications are also a great way to celebrate frontline employees and contributors so that you’re making heroes of people at all levels of the company.
This type of article is particularly useful for leadership, because it makes it easier for busy executives to participate. Prepare a short list of questions on that issue’s theme for them to answer by email, video chat or phone. This format results in more authentic content and eliminates the need for ghostwriting (which employees usually see right through anyway).
Most of our digital newsletters include articles that provide a glimpse of who employees are as people. For instance, each issue might include a different employee answering a five-question quiz ranging from their secret talent to what they eat for breakfast. Or you might ask employees what advice they would give now to themselves at the beginning of their careers.
