Hi Catherine
We have recently undergone a review of our parent newsletter and have made some significant changes to both the content and format.
Our newsletter is distributed fortnightly on Friday afternoons to parents, staff and students. We use Campaign Monitor, which provides reporting on opens and click-throughs. To measure engagement with individual articles, we include a ‘Read More’ button for each story, as this is the only reliable way for us to track article-level readership. Each article includes a short introduction and sidebar image, followed by the button linking to a landing page hosted on the backend of our website. We’ve found this also improves the reader experience by reducing scrolling and allowing people to choose the content most relevant to them.
Our content currently includes:
• Thought leadership articles, beginning with the Principal’s article and followed by three articles from members of the Leadership Team. These align to a theme selected for each edition. I generally develop the theme around recent or upcoming calendar events – eg, our last edition focused on ‘Learning and Growth’ and the next will focus on ‘Belonging’.
• Diary Dates
• Faith and Wellbeing (Prayer)
• Upcoming Events
• Student Achievements
• Community news, events, invitations and updates relevant to a broad cross-section of families. Year-specific events are generally included only in Diary Dates to help keep the newsletter concise.
From a workflow perspective, the newsletter sits within the Communications team, which consists of myself and our Communications Administrator (both part-time). I develop an editorial plan, identify contributors, and we coordinate content collection and editing centrally. This has helped us maintain consistency in tone and messaging while ensuring responsibility for content is shared across the school.
We’re still relatively early in the new format but initial feedback has been positive. We’re finding the more curated approach helps reduce information overload while keeping families informed and reinforcing our school’s identity and key messages. Our current open rate sits at around 55% and we’re interested to see how that evolves as families become more familiar with the new format.