Write A Newsletter For Your Organization

One of the largest chores for a Freethought organization is publishing a newsletter. They are always looking for help in the form of articles to publish or volunteers to proof-read. If you have something to say or a story to relate, write up an article about it. Because newsletters are exchanged nationwide between Freethought groups, it keeps the national Freethought community apprised about the status of various issues. Editors would most like to hear about a personal experience, a unique point of view or additional comment on current events. Contact the person who handles the newsletter and ask about acceptable forms of submission. They may prefer an email rather than a printed document and may also suggest a font size or formatting to make their job a little easier.

Better yet, volunteer to be the newsletter editor. It shouldn't cost you a dime to perform the duties. If you don't already have a word processing program, you can download Open Office for free. Open Office is available for Windows, Linux, Mac and Solaris operating systems and has versions in 30 languages. Beyond word processing, Open Office provides all the programs you would get from Microsoft's Office Suite.

In designing the newsletter, you will need a name which may or may not include the name of your organization. You may also want a graphic to go along with your title. Set this up at the top of page one. To make things easier, set up a template to be used for each newsletter. Some things that work best in headers and footers are; issue #, date, organization name, mailing address, website, volume #, page #, motto. There are other items that belong in every newsletter and should therefore be in your template, such as; any of the previously mentioned items that were not placed in the header or footer, a membership sign-up form, calendar of events, how to contact the editor, names of board members, and perhaps the membership policy or mission statement. If you can predict where you will want columns, put those in ahead of time too. Save your template design.

Now, as far as content for your newsletter, where do you get information legally? First, ask others for submissions. You can even put this request into the newsletter template. Subscribe to the newsletters of other groups and you may find articles you would like to reprint (with permission). Get RSS feeds from your favorite Freethought websites and bloggers. You can create news alerts on Google news and other sources and use your local city as a search term along with other relevant terms. That way you will be sure to keep your members informed of local news and events they would be interested in hearing. Write articles based on your personal opinion of current events or about personal experiences. Try to find a source for a comic. You may have an artist/comedian in the group just looking for an opportunity like this. In all of your articles, use a graphic from the news story or one you find on the web to give the newsletter some color. It's also a good idea to put links in your story to websites where members can get more info on the subject.

Coming up with good story ideas is one of the toughest tasks in publishing a newsletter. Here's a checklist of story sources to stimulate editorial thinking and help identify topics with high reader interest that help to promote the organization.

News: search news sources for relevant articles and analyses of event and trends.
How-To articles: Instructions, examples, how to's on activism or duties of volunteer positions.
Previews and reports: Write-ups of special events such as meetings, conventions, book release, conferences.
Case histories: Either in-depth or brief, reporting historical successes stories, broad overviews, etc.
People: awards, birthdays, profiles, human interest stories, etc.
Milestones: group's anniversary," achievements, etc.
Photos with captions: People; places; products; events.
Columns: President's letter; letters to the editor; guest columns; regular features such as "Q&A"."
Excerpts, reprints, or condensed versions of: Press releases, journal articles, etc.
Overseas activities: Reports on international activities; profiles of foriegn people, groups, etc.
Gimmicks: Contents; quizzes; puzzles; games; cartoons.

Once you have completed a newsletter, make sure you have updated things like the issue or volume number, date and other items in the header, footer and elsewhere that may need updating. Save it with the date or issue number. Then convert the file from a text document to a .pdf file. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat or you only have the reader, you can get a program called pdf995 for free that will do the conversion. Just download and install the program, it acts as a printer on your system. So, to convert the document, just choose "print" and select the pdf995 printer.

To distribute your newsletter to all members, it is easier to place the newsletter file on the web, either on your organizations website, on a Yahoo! Group site or even if you have to get one of those free websites just to park a file. This eliminates attachment problems in emails. You just have to send everyone a link to the newsletter file. It makes things much easier when you have members on sites like Meetup.com.