Create a newsletter

Newsletters are a great benefit to a club, helping keep members in touch with reports, upcoming events and news.  But as postage costs increase plus the cost of paper, envelopes and printer toner it quickly becomes an expensive exercise, especially if you want to produce monthly issues, so why not go electronic?

Creating your newsletter on-line is very easy and you have a choice of formats:

(i)   PDF / Word
(ii)  Dedicated pages on your website

 

Creating a PDF/Word Newsletter
This format produces print-ready pages, particulary suitable if members want to print some or all pages. 

First of all create your pages in Word, it's worth mentioning that if your computer uses the Vista operating system you will need to ensure you save the document so it can be ready by any other version of Word, so remember not to save it as a docx file).  Once the newsletter is complete it is best, if possible, to convert it to a PDF (read how to make a PDF).

Now create a page either in the members only area, if you want to limit viewing to just members, or in the public areas.  Now upload the PDF to the public files and create a link from the new page to the PDF file - read how to access PDF and document files.

 

Dedicated Newsletter pages on your website
There are many advantages to this approach: the newsletter can be easily viewed at any time on any computer; no downloading is required (some users are uneasy about downloading files); you can link to other pages that exist in your website; and if you publish the pages in the public area Google will include the content in it's searches - good news if you are trying to increase membership.

One additional benefit is by giving editing rights to contributors you can share the work out, retaining ultimate publishing rights to one person.

To create a newsletter on-line (like this one) you can either create a main menu entry or create a sub-menu on one of your main pages called Newsletter.  If you create a main menu entry (as I have) then you can create a sub menu for each month; alternatively you can follow the same layout as you would on a sub-menu page, where you create a link to a hidden page for each month (how to make a hidden page).

 

 

Mailing your newletter
Whichever method you follow, when it comes to mailing you simply email a link to the newsletter page to all your members. 

 

 

 

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