1. Contact Information
Try to provide a name, telephone number, and email for the following contact people.
Membership
· New people want to get acquainted with their neighbors and take advantage of the available programs
· Make sure that the first person the potential members speak to makes an effort to tell them what is going on in the community, to invite them to a meeting, and to find out some of their interests
· If the potential member is just learning about community leagues mention the benefits first, how to get involved second, and then membership purchase. This is all good info to have next to a membership director's contact information.
Hall Rentals
General Information
What email or phone number should I use? If you use a hall phone or a general email box for any or all of these contacts you must have a dedicated person to retrieve these preferably daily, or alternatively at least every other day - Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays. It is not recommended to use personal email accounts for outside contacts. With so many free email services such as Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Hotmail, or Yahoo mail, it is so easy to setup the accounts you need. bestleague@yahoo.ca, bestleague.president@gmail.com etc. EFCL is offering one free email account if a league should require one and for example would look like sherbrooke@yourcommunityleague.com
2. News & Activities
Report the goings on and upcoming events. Include pictures with lots of happy faces. Highlight action and accomplishments.
Regularly delete dated information. Usually this requires biweekly or monthly maintenance on a web and editorial review prior to publishing a newsletter.
Calendars give quick overviews of activities and very good to include in a chronological list form or month view.
Outside announcements & activities should be limited to what your members might be interested in.
Highlight Volunteers and draw attention to appreciation events and social gatherings. This attracts new volunteers.
Be sure to have contact details to register or find out more information about your programs. Include location, program details, & registration deadlines.
The advertisement program is entirely up to you. It is generally recommended to try and assess what readers want and put ads on appropriate pages. Imagine how much you would read of a page or how much you would skip if it were too covered in ads. Keep a good balance.
5. Electronic Newsletters
If you have images you need to use smaller resolution pictures – generally 80 kb. Open them up in paint or photoshop (best) and save with smaller resolution and smaller size. Resizing pictures takes a lot of memory. Most files keep the original and the resized copy actually doubling the resolution size. Make sure pictures are also resized properly in paint or photoshop.
Avoid scanned documents – try to convert them to text.
Attached is the pdf converter which works with word or excel and will significantly reduce file size but 9mb is much too big to start with. My 24 page newsletter with pics was only 2 mb. A lot of people still aren’t allowed anything over 5 mb. So you need to keep this in mind.
To comply with anti-spam standards always include actual subject and source (league name) in the subject line and at the bottom include phone, address, name and email, and have the ability to unsubscribe at the bottom of the email - insert a mail to link.