4 Tips for Repurposing Nonprofit Newsletter Content

You put a lot of work into your newsletters. They don’t have to be a one-and-done! Here are four tips for repurposing your nonprofit’s newsletter content:

1. Repurpose forwards and backwards

Whether it’s a print or email newsletter, you’ll need to populate it with content. You can either write something new from scratch, or repurpose existing content. Luckily, there are many sources of content that you can mine for your newsletter:

• blog / recent news section of your website
• client/donor emails and letters
• presentation slides
• interviews
• social media updates

Emails in particular are an underutilized source for content repurposing. Think of all the questions you’ve answered or stories you’ve told in emails to colleagues, clients and friends. In fact, virtually all of this blog post was repurposed from an email to a Bloomerang customer asking about how to repurpose their newsletter.

Conversely, if you create original content for your newsletter, you can repurpose that content into all of the channels and formats listed above. It works both ways!

2. Host it on your website

When it comes to re-sharing your newsletter content outside of the it’s native channel (email, for example) you have a few options.

Some email clients and services allow you to create a shareable URL of your newsletter – what they typically call an “archive page.”

For example, here is the archive page of one of our recent newsletters: http://us6.campaign-archive2.com/?u=0c63a34de16b96086957c4493&id=a62315473b

Archive pages are a handy way to share content on the fly, but not an ideal longt-erm solution.

One problem with archive pages is that you would be driving traffic to your email client (in this case, MailChimp) and not to your organization’s website. After they view your campaign archive page, what can they do next?

If the content lived on a webpage or blog post, they could navigate throughout your site, rather than closing the campaign archive page after reading and moving on. To put it simply, you can keep visitors on your website longer.

So, instead of sharing the archive page of our newsletter, we created a blog post: https://bloomerang.co/blog/the-nonprofit-wrap-up-april-2015/

3. Avoid the PDF

Some nonprofits simply create a PDF file of their full newsletter and share it as a downloadable file.

Unfortunately, PDFs are not an ideal way to publish or share content. They are great for securing documents that need to be emailed, printed or otherwise filled out.

There isn’t an easy way to track how many times a PDF is downloaded or viewed. If the newsletter content was on a webpage or blog post, you could track views via Google Analytics or your website CMS. This would give you a lot of insights that could inform your content creation going forward.

PDFs also aren’t great for search engine optimization. If the content was published on a webpage or blog post, it would be easily crawlable and indexable by search engines, which means a higher chance of content discovery.

Finally, it’s just bad user experience. A website visitor would have to download a file (which they may not expect to have to do) and open the file (which could be quite large) in a PDF viewer. What if they do not have a PDF viewer? What if the viewer they have isn’t updated and your content isn’t viewed optimally? It creates additional steps, as opposed to just clicking through to another webpage on your site.

4. Create multiple articles

Depending on the length of your newsletter, you may be able to create more than one article. Rather than just creating one long article entitled “July Newsletter,” repurpose it into multiple articles. For example, if your newsletter consists of 1) a client story 2) a press release and 3) a note from the ED, you have three pieces of content – each with its own unique URL, target audience and purpose. Don’t hold all that good content hostage!

Repurposing can take a lot of pressure off nonprofit marketers and communication staff members. Do you repurpose your newsletter content? How? Let me know in the comments below!