Knowledgebase

TRANSCRIPT

You can keep your members and prospects up to speed with chapter activities using monthly newsletters. Here's how to create them.

• First, prepare the text and graphics for your newsletter. I have a few images and posts to present in our dummy newsletter today.
• Once our preparations are done, we’ll get going. Start under Content > Community > Newsletter. We’ll click on the button at the top to add a new one.
• Our newsletter needs a name. You can name it whatever you want, but be sure to adjust the publish date (to the right) to make sure that it’s properly archived. You also have the option to publish this newsletter automatically on a future date. The newsletter can either be freeform, which allows you many formatting options, or template-based. The template-based newsletter limits the formatting options to ensure that your newsletters have a consistent, professional look. If you plan to use images in your newsletter, it’s important that they be similarly sized. Otherwise, the final newsletter can look a bit scattered. I’ll use Freeform for today.
• Once this information is set, click on the Next button to go to the following screen.
• A list of content sections appears here. This includes system defaults and ones that you've used in the past. These sections are just headlines that you can add content under. Newsletters typically include the same sorts of features, like a welcome message, program recap, or a treasury report. If we've never had a treasury report before, we'll have to create a new section for it to live under.
• You can click to add content under any existing section. Or to make a new one, click on the Add a Section button at the top. I’ll go into my prepared text. I’ll create a new reusable section and give it a title. I can make the section a Default Section, one that will automatically be included in new newsletters. It won’t have the same content under it, of course.
• And if we want, we can make this section show in the sidebar. This is for something like a nod to the sponsors, or maybe a list of board members, not a featured article in the Newsletter.
• If we like, we can include this in the brief Newsletter Article List that you may have on your home page. This is entirely optional. You might or might not be using it. If you do choose to use it, you’ll see a spot to include an icon, which is a representative image for this part of the newsletter, and a short excerpt.
• In the content box below, we’ll put in the full text of this content section. I’m just copying and pasting that from my prepared Word document, and then doing a little bit of editing for the spacing. And when we’re ready, we’ll add this in. We’ll repeat that process for the other sections of the newsletter. To get an idea of what this newsletter will look like, use the Preview button on the upper right.
• Just like editing content on pages, you can click and drag to rearrange your newsletter sections. On the next screen, we’ll get a recap of what we’ve done, and a notice that the newsletter is inactive. It’s not accessible yet because our date hasn’t yet arrived.
• If we want to make that happen right now, we’ll click on the Make Current button. That will make this newsletter active. This means that when someone clicks on our newsletter link in the main menu, this is the newsletter that they’ll see. This is also the newsletter that will be used for the newsletter section on our home page, if we happen to be using it. We can also go back to make edits in any particular section.
  While we’re here, I do want to show you one more thing, which is how to move a newsletter section from the sidebar to the main content area. Occasionally, people set up a new newsletter section and accidentally check the box to make it show in the sidebar, which means that the content will be squished in the left side instead of taking up the larger amount of space in that main section.
• If you have that, go under Community to Settings > Newsletter. Edit your wandering section and clear that sidebar check box. That will move the section back to the main area.
• So if we’re ready to make our new newsletter current, we’ll click on the Make Current button on the right. We’ll get an on-screen confirmation, and this will also move our last newsletter automatically into a newsletter archive.
  
  

And that’s all there is to it! For a walkthrough on how to send this newsletter out to your member and non-member contacts, check out our video on how to send an email. Thanks!