Academic Essay, Master’s Program, Digital Writing & Media

How can I make people want to read this newsletter? This was the question I kept asking myself as I put my first newsletter together four months ago. The images were cleanly designed and branded, the necessary information was present, and the overall layout was aesthetically-pleasing, but it felt incomplete. Reading it over, I realized: This newsletter deployed to 150 people and it read like it. Sure, on Mailchimp you can merge tag *FNAME* to have your campaign address each subscriber by first name, but it wasn’t enough. It slowly dawned on me that I had no idea how to write for a digital audience. How do you write engaging content for 150 virtual individuals?

As I examined the designs and copy, I thought about the changes I would make if I were the only person reading the newsletter: I might add a silly joke here, or reference an employee there, to give the content more vitality and contextualization. Well, I thought, I could be the only person reading it. After all, it had been more than a month since the last newsletter went out (it was supposed to be bi-weekly), due to personnel changes. The question wasn’t even how to get people to read, it was: “Would anyone besides me read?” This thought comforted me: if no one besides me was going to read this newsletter, all I had to do was write for myself. Marwick and boyd hypothesize in “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately” that emphasizing the ‘me’ when writing for digital audiences “may also be a self-conscious, public rejection of audience” (118). In my case, the reduction of my audience to a singular reader—and that reader being myself—allowed me to overcome the anxiety I felt writing for an unknown digital audience. As one participant tweeted in Markwick and boyd’s study, “I write the tweets I want to read” (119); thus, I would write a newsletter I would want to read. And, if my lone reader was me, I would want to read a newsletter that would make me laugh.

But it was, after all, still a company newsletter, and it had to represent the company’s purpose well—encouraging meaningful human connections. The newsletter itself was still community-oriented and the information it provided was helpful to its readers, but a genuine, authentic human connection was missing. The initial intention of the newsletter was to connect its virtual readers from all over the world, to create a sense of community. Somewhere, that had gotten lost. I decided to lead with what I knew best—and what I knew best was connecting with people through humor. 

Adding Voice to the Introduction

For the language and communication company at which I worked, the focus was on helping others develop their authentic voice. But, in business, as one communicates externally to clients, stakeholders, and employees, it is standard practice to mask our authentic voices with professional ones. However, audiences tend to be aware of this disconnect between the two. As noted in Marwick and boyd’s study, audience members often perceive an “intrinsic conflict between self-promotion and the ability to connect with others on a deeply personal or intimate level” (128). The newsletter had primarily been used to relay information, in an upbeat, generic business way. Even though the internal debate I had about adding a humorous tone to the company newsletter was excruciating, the idea of bridging business and comedy is not a new one. In her article on incorporating humor into public speaking, comedian Jane Condon writes, “Comedy is a great way to get people to listen. To wake up an audience. To connect. To teach…It can make an audience remember you” (par. 1). I considered how to begin incorporating humor and authenticity into the newsletter while maintaining necessary professional boundaries. My upbringing on a dairy farm in rural Wisconsin was a major influence on the development of my authentic voice and is an area with which I was familiar enough and comfortable with to begin weaving lighthearted humor into the newsletter.

Hay there, *FNAME*, I started, let’s catch up! 

A joke, a play on words. (The readers were language coaches, after all.) The addition of “Let’s catch up!” not only acknowledged the gap in newsletter production time but was also an informal expression, something a friend might say to you. I followed the greeting with a bulleted list of agenda items that would be covered in the newsletter (signaled by the phrase “in this week’s newsletter…”) that were sure to pique the interest of readers. It would help keep them engaged, and it would also forecast the organization of the newsletter. 

Lastly, I wanted to create a sign off: it would not only be an opportunity to incorporate a little more personality into the introduction of the newsletter, it would also signal to the reader that there was a new writer—and that writer was me. That way, even if a reader was unaware of who I was, they would at least be able to associate a name to the newsletter. “Lots to get through,” I wrote, “So let’s get moo-ving!” The re-use of the word “lots” and the play on the words “moo” and “moving” kept the tone informal and playful, as I added a picture of a smiling cow and my name. Reflecting now, the humor wasn’t too overbearing. However, at the time, because it was taking a company voice and personifying it with my own to induce a sense of connectedness, it felt scary. But the readers responded to it. Not only were they invigorated by a simple change in tone, they began anticipating getting to laugh while being updated on important information (see fig. 1, appendix).

The introduction evolved to become a full-fledged cold open for the rest of the newsletter. While the initial introduction was around 50 words and featured one image, the last edition had triple the word count (~150 words) and two gifs (moving images). However, key elements from that first newsletter are a consistent presence:

1. There is always a personalized greeting
2. There is always a forecasting agenda (signaled by the phrase “Let’s catch up! In this week’s newsletter…”)
3. There is always a “theme” to create humor through wordplay
4. There is always a sign off that includes my name

These elements together serve to create a personalized experience beyond the simple “Hello, *FNAME*” greeting typically found in email newsletter campaigns. In addition, one element that has also evolved over time is a reference back to the previous newsletter, which generally called for some type of reader interaction or input. This usually falls between the greeting and the forecasting agenda. Not only does this further serve the intent to create a genuine feeling of belonging to a community where your efforts and input are acknowledged, it also creates a sense of readership agency in the newsletter. (I.e., “I have the opportunity to influence the writing of the newsletter by participating or interacting with the materials in the newsletter.”)

Changing the introduction to be more authentic and personal, based on my intention to increase a feeling of community and belonging to that community, has brought about a balance of company voice and authenticity. This balance has created a sense of inclusion in that readers are made to feel personally connected to the company through a real person. 

Standardizing the Content Structure

Embodying a company newsletter with an authentic voice would not need to be the only change to re-engage readership: the newsletter would need to contain relevant and beneficial information and material. I wanted to internalize the notion that this newsletter would provide the reader with 1) critical information pertaining to their job, 2) a place to connect with other virtual members of the community, and 3) useful resources available to them. 

These intentions were created based on the imagined expectations of myself as a reader using an intuition-driven model of audience. An intuition-driven model of audience is built on how “communicators imagine the audience and draw on their internal representation of the audience as a guide to writing and design” (Schriver 156). As Schriver noted in her case study on how to conceptualize audience for document design, “The strength of intuitive models is that they capture, in ways what other models do not, the phenomenon that skilled communicators are good at “doing things with words and pictures” that get the audience’s attention and keep it” (159). To do that, I organized the newsletter into three key sections: “Updates”, “Community”, and “Resources”. These sections were determined by looking holistically at the content predominantly featured in the newsletter. To visually signal to the reader what category of information they were about to receive, I created section headings using the “boxed text” option in Mailchimp. The background color is black with white text (as opposed to the content’s black text on white background) so that it further draws attention to the categorization. The sections always follow the same order: “Updates”, “Community”, “Resources”.  The simplicity and consistency of this structure help internalize the knowledge of where to locate relevant information with key phrases. 

Updates 

The “Updates” section always comes first, as it contains critical information readers need to know for their jobs. I put this section first in anticipation of readers dropping off: if readers became disengaged early with the content, they would, hypothetically, at least have read the most vital part of the newsletter. 

Community

The “Community” section serves to surface the impact the readers have on the company and helps socialize community standards by including detailed recognition of community members.

Resources

This section’s function is to provide readers with new resources, socialize the agency readers have to utilize available resources, and provide opportunities for readers to contribute their own expertise and knowledge to those resources.

The flow of information follows the same format to provide a consistent structure its readers find easier for navigation and comprehension (see fig. 2, appendix). In addition, the use of these sub-headers internalizes for its readers that 1) relevant and beneficial information and materials will be in those sections and 2) the newsletter empowers them with critical information that affects their professional lives, a virtual community to participate in, and resources to enhance their classrooms.

Diversifying the Content

As the consistency in structure and the humorous, authentic voice of the newsletter circulated among the community, the newsletter gained more momentum and interaction between its readers. As they became more invested in the newsletter, I began to diversify the creation and distribution of digital materials in ways that encouraged a participatory audience, hoping to increase circulation of materials among the community. This notion of bringing circulation into the creation and distribution process is discussed by Edwards in “On Circulatory Encounters” as invention looking toward circulation (par. 3). This has led me to be innovative and creative when looking to embed participation into the newsletter and create interactive methods of online community-building and delivery of digital resources.

One example of participation embedded into the newsletter was a virtual mystery game I created that framed a prominent figure in the community, who was often traveling globally, as a criminal “on the run” and myself as the detective attempting to track her down. I created designs (see fig. 3, appendix) and a storyline for the game, the premise of which was based on the 1985 video game, Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? Every newsletter would a mini-narrative with a plea for readers to solve the clues and help me locate her. The “finale” was a video uploaded to YouTube that was designed in iMovie using pictures and ‘mystery’ sound effects. In an example of delivering digital resources, I created a “31 Days of Resources Calendar” that linked 31 individual lesson plans located in Google Drive on an image designed in Canva (see fig. 4, appendix). This was a digital .pdf innovation on the traditional chocolate advent calendars given to children around Christmas time. At the end of December 2018, I created a “2018 Coach Community Yearbook” a digital .pdf version of a traditional yearbook, designed “retro-style” on Canva, that featured submitted highlights of a reader’s personal and professional highlights. 

Often, these digital projects required engagement and interaction from a participatory audience to create the content (for example, readers had to submit their personal and professional highlights so that I could edit and design a yearbook). As DeLuca notes in “Shared Passions, Shared Compositions”, the validation of fandoms as online communities can “foster student engagement, encouraging students to view themselves as digital citizens who contribute in meaningful, rhetorically significant ways to communities and groups through multimodal composition” (77). In much the same way, the effort and care these creative endeavors require has empowered newsletter readers to view themselves as active and rhetorical participants with the power to meaningfully contribute to their virtual community (see fig. 5, appendix). 

Conclusion

When I took on the responsibility of writing the newsletter, I wanted it to deliver important information in an engaging way, create a sense of community, and be professionally and personally beneficial to its readers. Importantly, I wanted it to feel like a friend had written it. As I sat in front of my laptop writing the first of what would become many jokes in my newsletter introduction, I was anxious. Humor was—and is—one of my preferred methods of connecting with others, and in that moment, I saw it as a way I could reach out into the ether of the digital world and create a meaningful connection with another human being. As I considered how to write a newsletter that would do that, I decided it would start: Hay there, Crystal, let’s catch up!

It was a small joke, but it became the stepping stone for what is now a newsletter with unprecedented engagement and participation amongst its readers. Writing for an intuitive-driven audience model with an emphasis on ‘me’ allowed me to balance company values and authentic voice to deliver a consistently-structured, innovative, and highly-anticipated digital newsletter.

All readers/participants’ names are withheld for privacy reasons or reproduced here with permission.

Works Cited

Condon, Jane. “Putting the Funny into Business Speeches.” Forbes, 17 October 2016,

http://www.forbes.com/sites/womenatforbesfiles/2016/10/17/putting-the-funny-into-business-speeches/#eee1b997a494. Accessed 13 January 2019.

DeLuca, Katherine. “Shared Passions, Shared Compositions: Online Fandom Communities and Affinity Groups as Sites for Public Writing Pedagogy.” Computers and Composition, vol. 47, March 2018, pp. 75-92. doi.org/10.1016/j.compcom.2017.12.003/. Accessed 11 January 2019.

Edwards, Dustin. “On Circulatory Encounters: The Case for Tactical Rhetorics.” enculturation, October 2017, n.p., enculturation.net/circulatory_encounters. Accessed 11 January 2018.

Marwick, Alice and danah boyd. “I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience.” new media & society, vol. 13, no. 1, 2010, pp. 114-133, DOI: 10.1177/146144481036531. Accessed 11 January 2019.

Schriver, Karen. “How Documents Engage Readers’ Thinking and Feeling.” Dynamics in Document Design: Creating Text for Readers, Wiley Publishing, 1997, pp. 151-207. Electronic scan.