Internal newsletters: Practical advice before you start

As an internal communications consultant, here's a refrain I hear regularly inside organisations: "We need better internal communication. Let's create a newsletter!"

Stop right there.

Before you rush into designing templates or drafting content calendars, ask yourself a harder question: What problem are you trying to solve with this newsletter?

A newsletter is a tactic, not an objective. So slow down a bit and do some thinking first.

Organisations often default to newsletters without getting clear on their objective first. It's the communication equivalent of prescribing medicine before diagnosing the illness. It’s like saying “Let’s take some antibiotics!” without knowing if you have a bacterial infection.

This lack of strategic thinking leads directly to the second problem: most employee newsletters are, frankly, terrible. Without a clear purpose driving decisions or an understanding of why a newsletter is important to drive business success, internal newsletters are often rushed, cobbled together from whatever content is lying around, too long, repetitive, poorly written and ultimately ignored.

Another problem I see in organisations is multiple newsletters, all competing with each other for employee attention. There's the all-company newsletter, the HR newsletter, the IT newsletter, the AI newsletter, the sustainability newsletter… each department has defaulted to newsletters to communicate and the result is information overload that makes employees tune out completely.

Start with an objective

My advice is this: Before you create any communications, get clear on your objective first. What problem are you trying to solve in the business? What are you trying to achieve? What do you want employees to DO as a result of your communications?

Once you're crystal clear on what you’re trying to achieve, then you can work backwards from there to identify the tactics that are most likely to help you achieve that. Is a newsletter actually the right tactic to achieve your goal? Maybe, maybe not. It will depend on your objective, your context, your audience, your resources.

Practical advice for a great newsletter

If you do decide a newsletter is the right approach, then think about optimising for both mechanics and content – in other words, make it easy to access and make the content worth reading. Let’s look at both.

Mechanics: Make it easy for employees to access the newsletter content. Avoid PDFs attached to emails; you’re asking too much of them. Think zero-click content: Put the essential information right in front of their face, right in the body of the email so they see it immediately without any effort.

Content: This is where most internal newsletters fail spectacularly. They become dumping grounds for whatever departments want to announce, regardless of relevance or quality. Have some guardrails for what content does and doesn’t go in your newsletter. This should all tie back to your objective and what you’re trying to achieve. Make sure the newsletter content is written for your readers (and not the approvers), too many internal newsletters are written to please executives rather than serve employees. The result is corporate-speak or confusing terminology that no one wants to read and no one can understand.

Now, I know this sounds like a lot of work. And it is! Despite their bad reputation, I think an internal newsletter can be an excellent tool once it's gotten the time, effort and resources behind it. Creating a quality newsletter requires significant effort and at least SOME investment. You’re talking about strategic planning, editorial management, content sourcing, writing, interviewing, ghostwriting, editing, design, targeted distribution, metrics analysis and continuous iteration based on reader feedback. If you're not prepared for this commitment, don't start, especially if you were thinking of a weekly newsletter. It’s a big commitment and again, the quality matters. It really matters.

Parting thoughts

Before you create another newsletter, define your communication objective clearly. Then honestly assess whether a newsletter is the right solution. If it is, commit to doing it properly, or don't do it at all. Find a lighter-touch solution to help you achieve the same goal.

Because in a world already drowning in information, the last thing your employees need is another mediocre newsletter cluttering their inbox.

Joanna Parsons
Founder and CEO
The Curious Route