Newsletters online
Newsletters online…
How it saves your school money, saves you time and saves the world trees!
One of the first things we hear from schools when they come onboard is how effective putting the newsletter online has been. Rather than spending time and money printing and distributing the newsletter (only to see it scrunched up in the bottom of a school bag!), by putting it online you’re saving time, money and trees!
We have found the most successful way to get the newsletter online is to encourage parents to subscribe to the newsletter through the school’s website. The parents’ emails addresses then go to a database and each week an alert email goes out to advise the parents that the latest newsletter is available. The email can be a simple statement that advises the newsletter is now online or the email can even list the newsletter article topics with links that take them back to the website.
Some principals have come across the issue of some parents being very attached to receiving a printed newsletter and are not interested in the online version. We have found one very resourceful principal who counters this problem by sending out a 1 page, 2 sided newsletter that lists article topics with a small intro blurb and ends on ‘for more information, please visit our website…‘. This is a very effective way to reduce printing. Alternately if parents don’t have ready access to the internet, a small amount of copies of the newsletter could be left at reception.
Working on the general figures below, this is what your school can save each year…
Average student enrolment: 300
Average newsletter size: 2 sheets (4 sides)
Newsletter weeks in a year: 39
= 600 pages a week
= 47 reams per year
= $1175 spent on paper
= 3 trees needing to be replanted each year!
By using your website as a single source to hold all of you school information, it saves the needless emailing of PDF’s that clog up inboxes. It also gets parents into the habit of visiting the website and reading up on all the school activities.
