Part two: Creating newsletters that don't suck

Reading is optional. The people who look at your newsletter are virtually all going to start by skimming it.

This isn't necessarily a commentary on the content (though it could be!) but more the reality of how little time people have.

So, how do you get your point across when most people are just going to spend 10 seconds skimming what you send them anyway?

Here's how...

Write compelling headlines that tell the whole story.

Headlines are the most important part of your newsletter. But they are usually thrown on as an afterthought, once everyone has spent hours and hours tinkering with text that most people aren't ever going to read anyway.
This is the exact opposite of how it should be. For every ten people who read your headlines, one person might go on to read the article.
It's not uncommon to spend as much time writing the headlines as it takes to write the articles, especially at first.
What I find missing from most headlines are verbs. That's where the action is. Literally. The headlines I see usually function more as labels than headlines

A weak headline would be something like, "Special Deliveries" or "Saturday Kid's Program."

A strong headline has a teaser, a main headline, and a subhead. For example:

Sponsored by you...MassVOTE's youth team lobbies for change

Pre-Registration Bill Would Make It Easier for Teens to Vote

68 Visits with Mass. State Legislators Moves Bill Out of Committee into House of Representatives

That's all one headline for one story -- totaling 34 words.

If you want to know if your headline is effective, have someone who hasn't read your article read it. If they can't tell you what the article is about and why it's important from just the headline, keep working on it until they can.

Use photo captions, pull quotes, and other tricks to visually tell your story.

Your eyes are drawn to anything that is different from the standard columns of text. Make that work to your advantage.

Capitalize on things like...

Pull quotes -- a compelling line from your article, shown in a larger font on the page.
Subheads -- mini-headlines throughout lengthy articles to break up dense text and summarize sections.
Bullet lists and text boxes.
Photos, illustrations, charts, and graphs.
Captions for these pictures and other graphics. Once you look at the visual, you're almost guaranteed to read the caption. Don't miss out on this opportunity to tell your story.

Use a two-line caption that tells us -- what we are looking at (in the first line); why it's important (in the second line).
For example: A member of and the Empower Energy Cooperative transports a jug of waste oil for recycling into fuel. Empower Energy was started by a collective of five who were unable to find work because of their criminal records.

Make it easy on the eyes.

The easier it is to read your newsletter, the longer people will stick around. The name of the game is making it effortless. And that's your goal when you hit the design phase -- presenting your content in the most readable way.

After you spend all this time writing, you don't want people to have to work to read it.

Studies have been done on different fonts and colors. We know what is statistically proven to be easier to read.

So, to make it easy for your readers...

Use serif fonts like Times or Garamond for print publications. Use sans serif fonts like Arial or Helvetica for e-newsletters. (The "feet" of the serif font that make letters easier to identify in print blur on screen.)
Use black ink on white paper -- not colored ink, not white ink on black (also known as reverse or knockout type), not colored paper or colored background.
Indent your paragraphs.
Leave "white space" -- don't cram text all the way to the margins.
Format your text in 2-3 columns; don't run your text all the way across the page.

Let me be clear...this isn't about what I like. And you may think it's boring. But it's statistically proven to make it easier for people to read.

Remember -- it doesn't matter how pretty you think your materials are if no one is reading them.

And, none of this is to say that you can never use a sans serif font or reverse type or colored ink or a colored background. Just be aware of the research and break the rules for an accent, not for primary text or major headlines.

Make it easy on the brain.

I don't care how smart you or your donors are, where you all went to college, or what your IQ is. Once reading your newsletter becomes time consuming and laborious, your brilliant supporters will move on to the other ways they'd prefer to spend their precious time.

To say it another way, the easier you can make it for people to read your newsletter, the longer they'll spend with it.

Write for a 7-8^th grade reading level. Newspaper articles are around the 8th-grade level.

Now, how do you know what level you're writing at?

Microsoft Word has a built-in tool to help -- the Flesch-Kincaid scale.

Flesch-Kincaid grades your writing based on the length of your words, sentences, and paragraphs. It's a feature that usually has to be enabled. But once set up, whenever you do a spelling or grammar check, you'll get a quick readability report at the end that includes a Reading Ease Score and a Grade Level Score.

Aim for a Reading Ease Score of 60-70 (the higher, the better). And, go for a Grade Level Score of 7-8.

Check your score regularly when you write. To lower your scores, write shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

For the record -- this issue of Keep the Change is written at the 6^th Grade Level and has a Reading Ease Score of 75.