Dennis Meredith

PIO FORUM

by Dennis Meredith

eNewsletters revisited

A previous column discussed e-mail newsletters (SW, Fall 2001), and putting theory into practice, in September 2002 Duke launched the “eDuke” e-mail newsletters. The process of developing, launching, marketing, and managing eDuke confirmed many of the assumptions put forth in that earlier column, but also brought some surprises. Those experiences might prove useful to ScienceWriters readers.

The three eDuke newsletters-a daily, a monthly, and media clips-have nearly 8,000 subscribers. Although there is overlap in subscriptions, the vast majority (7,000) subscribe to the monthly eDuke, which is a selection of the most significant news releases, articles, and clips over the previous month. Most subscribers identified themselves as alumni or administrators on the subscription form, which shows that the newsletter is useful for both external and internal communications. Also, about 3,000 people subscribe to the eDuke daily media clips service, which indicates a great many people are interested in finding out what the world is saying about Duke.

So, our experience to date has confirmed our belief that many of the university’s key audiences like the convenience of having Duke news show up in their e-mail. You can see samples (or sign up for any or all) of the three eDuke newsletters at www.eduke.duke.edu.

I’d written earlier that launching an e-mail newsletter system requires collaboration across the university, and indeed it has. My role was that of an advisor. The main work of developing the system was done by Office of News and Communications (ONC) staffer Karen Hines and programmers Michael Bacon and Rob Carter, of Duke’s Office of Information Technology. Daily editorial management is done by eDuke editor Monte Basgall of the ONC, and individual “topic editors” across campus oversee their eDuke Monthly sections. Another key to the system’s success was having a champion among the university leadership to ensure the project is seen as a priority and that the various offices work together. In the case of eDuke, that leader was David Jarmul, associate vice president of News and Communications. Much of what I write about eDuke in this column comes from the experiences of this team.

One early surprise was that none of the commercial packages mentioned in the previous column met the needs of our e-mail newsletter. We needed software with sophisticated editorial management capabilities that those packages simply didn’t offer. For example, the system had to allow editors from across campus to access and edit their entries but not those of others. Also, the system had to allow us to designate items for the daily or monthly newsletter and tag items with publication dates. Finally, our dream system would allow subscribers to specify any combination of topics and receive an individualized eDuke Monthly that contained items only on those topics.

Given that none of the commercial packages could do all that, we asked our in-house programmers to develop a system for us. To our delight, they came up with everything we asked for-including the complex individualized newsletter capability. So, a general lesson about e-mail newsletters is that you can and should ask a lot of the system you develop or buy, in terms of its editorial management and personalization capabilities.

Also, you should expect special hardware needs in the form of a dedicated e-mail server or capacity on a powerful server capable of generating many thousands of newsletters at a time. Again, your technical folks can give you the best guidance.

It’s particularly important to have a communicator working with the programmers in developing your system or adapting the commercial package. We communicators know a lot about creating easy-to-use subscriber and editorial interfaces that will attract readers and simplify editorial management. However, expect to go through several iterations and broad testing before the interfaces are ready for prime time. In testing our subscriber and editorial interface, we discovered many unexpected ways in which people could be confused by the interfaces.

Many of the editorial design recommendations in my previous column have worked out well in eDuke. For example, we use a double opt-in subscribing process that automatically sends each new subscriber a confirming e-mail, to which the subscriber must respond before the subscription starts. Also, we use the general editorial layout discussed in the previous column-as ASCII format with each item consisting of a short headline followed by a concise description and a link to the full story.

The daily media clips, edited by ONC staffer Stuart Wells, uses the same layout, but unlike the eDuke Daily, is limited to about five major clips-a judgment of the number that subscribers are likely to be willing to scan each day. These clips are drawn from a wide-ranging roundup from search engines such as Google News and commercial online clipping services such as Lexis-Nexis and Factiva.

The typical editorial flow for the newsletters consists of preparation of the newsletter material by Monte or Stuart, followed by multiple proofing of the newsletters to catch typos, test the links, and review editorial decisions about the selection and order of items.

As I cautioned in the earlier column, the editor of the newsletters cannot be a student or junior staffer, but must be a professional communicator who understands the politics and communications objectives of the institution.

We believe it’s important that eDuke represent information sources across the university. So, the daily and monthly newsletters include more than news releases, but also links to articles from the alumni and other campus magazines, as well as Duke Web sites that will interest our audiences. Monte tells me that sometimes it is, however, a bit of a chore to prompt publishers of such print materials to post their articles on the Web in a timely way, and in an HTML format rather than as harder-to-access Adobe Acrobat files.

Regarding marketing, we found that many of the techniques discussed earlier have proven useful. For example, in our initial distribution we sent a sample newsletter to all the alumni on our e-mail list, and received many compliments-and, as far as I know, no complaints of spamming. Another key marketing step was to commission a design team to create a striking eDuke logo, which many Webmasters across campus have agreed to post on their home pages as a button link to the eDuke subscription page.

One successful marketing initiative came from a student, who produced an advertising video for eDuke for broadcast during Duke’s basketball and football games.

Even after nearly a year of experience, we’re still feeling our way on many management and editorial issues. For example, we’ve provisionally decided to reduce frequency of publication during the summer to twice a week, producing special eDuke Daily newsletters only as events warrant. However, the flow of news might not ebb during the summer doldrums, and we’ll have to return to daily publication.

Also, we need to create a version 2.0 of the newsletter system with a nicer interface and more categories than the 17 we now have. Each eDuke Monthly includes an “@Duke” section at the top that was originally meant to include only special announcements of general interest. However, we have found that significant news about faculty and staff issues doesn’t have a topical home, so we’ve had to place such items in this top section. Some subscribers quite correctly complained, saying that they subscribed to the monthly to receive only topics of interest and didn’t want to scroll through “administrivia” to get to what they consider the good stuff (mainly science, of course!).

In general, the newsletter system has proven a major success, which the university recognized by giving the newsletter team a Presidential Teamwork Award for projects that exemplify university-wide collaboration. Should you wish any advice on developing your own e-newsletter system, please don’t hesitate to call on me.

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Dennis Meredith is assistant v. p. of news and communications at Duke University. He can be reached at dennis.meredith@duke.edu or 919-681-8054. He welcomes comments and topic suggestions for future columns.