How to Make a More Interesting Newsletter for College Students

This is what a normal college student’s email looks like daily. So then the question is: How do you make YOUR newsletter standout? How can you ensure more clicks on your email? and even if you do get the reader to click on your email — How do you make them interested enough to read to the end?

After getting the position of Secretary and Historian of the Indian Student Association at the University of Virginia I was tasked with facing these questions head on. The organization’s main outlet for communicating events to our membership was through weekly newsletters. But, prior to getting this position I was 100% guilty of clicking through the newsletter and sometimes even putting it straight into my email’s trash. That’s when I knew that I had to make a change. If I, a person that is super passionate about the organization and attends most of the events was still not reading our main publicity, how could I expect anyone else to? My goal then was to completely remodel how we designed our newsletters.

Step 1: Understand how our membership interacts with publicity

Step 2: Know the audience

Step 3: Keep what works and fix what doesn’t

Step 4: Create clear calls to action

Step 5: Give an incentive to read further

Going into this re-design I already knew that our newsletter was the main source of communication with our membership, but that wasn’t good enough for me. I wanted to look into how much our members relied on other publicity platforms to stay in the loop with all things ISA related.

After conducting a survey with about 30 members I found that many people had a lot of problems with the newsletter; however, because they didn’t have a better way of getting information, they did refer to it when they wanted to be involved. Members used Facebook a decent amount, but each event was on a separate page and they liked that the newsletter compiled it all together.

With ISA at UVA being one of the largest cultural organizations on grounds and about 1500 people on our email list, there are a lot of different people that our newsletter goes out to. I made it a point to focus on empathy of the user. Not only did I have to keep in mind the pain-points, but I also wanted to ensure that the newsletter was interesting to all types of personalities. It was important to me to reach all ranges of people from extroverts to introverts, lazy to go-getter personalities, and super involved people to people that weren’t members but still wanted to receive our newsletter.

I went about this empathy in a couple of ways. I knew that having sections in the newsletter was something that worked well. It was important to have acknowledge a college kids busy lifestyle and know that the last thing they wanted was an information overload. So, I decided to keep the subheading titles, but the newsletter lacked excitement and a unified look.

I started with the logo. Nothing unifies a look more than a logo and nothing screams Indian Student Association more than the colors of the Indian flag. It came natural to have the colors of the flag and logo be the main parts of the newsletter instead of the random colors used before. I incorporated these colors into not only the new section heads, but also the text and buttons used.

The new color scheme gave a fun, yet composed look to the newsletter and the subheadings cut information to make it easier to read. But the problem still prevailed of how to make the newsletter more interactive.

With the old design we used hyper links for everything from Facebook Events to sign-up forms. If someone were to read through the email quickly they could easily pass over reserving a spot for an event thinking it was just another link to a facebook event.

I went about changing this by linking the Facebook events and not action oriented links how they were before. But indicating that action should be taken by inserting buttons instead. This way if the busy college student didn’t have much time to read every description, they could easily locate the buttons and see what forms they needed to fill out. This made the experience for the reader more efficient and if the button caught their eye, they could then read more about it in the description.

Lastly, my most favorite improvement was changing the the end of the newsletter. I wanted to create something that showed the lighthearted atmosphere of our organization, spotlighted the Executive Board, gave one last push for publicity, and most importantly made readers excited to read to the end of the newsletter. After a lot of hard thinking a lightbulb went off in my head…

The response to the memes have been so positive. I learned that by understanding the audience and knowing the goal of what you want to achieve, you can then create something that is going to do the trick.

The process of re-designing is not a one and done task. It is important to continue improvements. After this drastic makeover of the newsletter I have ideas to further facilitate the user experience. I plan on making an integrated calendar so members can easily add events to their personal calendars. Also, now that email is becoming a less preferable method of publicizing social events I want to research a way to send notifications directly to the phones of members to alert them that the weekly newsletter has released. My main take away was that research is a solid foundation of which can be built upon to continually make a better product.

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