Doing away with our newsletter?

[iteles]

I'm currently reading (listening to) [Essentialism](Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/0753555166) and it's made me think: do we need a newsletter at all? Does it serve our community the way we want it to?

We haven't had a newsletter for almost 2 months and last year there was a greater than 6 month gap and I didn't hear a single person ask after it.

So what do we do? Shall I put a question into our survey along the lines of 'Would you like us to keep producing a monthly newsletter or should we claw back that time and invest it in something else?" (After the mandatory 'do you get our newsletter' question)?

[RabeaGleissner]

I wonder if it would be more beneficial to have ad-hoc mailings, for example if a conference offers us free tickets or if there's a scholarship that our members could get. Then we can send out an email straight away to offer those kind of freebies and don't need to wait until the next monthly issue.

[inespons]

I agree with Rabea.

It feels like the newsletter is filling in for a much needed website. People's inboxes are already overloaded.
Any important announcements can be done via social media and, as Rabea suggests, with ad-hoc mailings.

If we ever have access to the website, we could have the up to date info there like the upcoming events, call for speakers, etc..

[iteles]

@RabeaGleissner I take your point but the reason we originally moved to a newsletter is because we get too many ad-hoc things throughout the month and felt that might be a bit too much for people's inboxes!

[NataliaLKB]

I like @inespons idea that many things we put in the newsletter could potentially go on the website, or just be tweeted about. Maybe we could limit the type of things we email to people? Maybe only really good deals on conferences, or things that are only for our community?

[iteles]

@RabeaGleissner @inespons @NataliaLKB Should we actually ask our community? Or stop and see if anyone notices? 😬

Our Twitter following isn't that amazing and we'd lose the only unobtrusive channel we have for putting cool jobs out to people (if it's in the newsletter it's either a 'you read it or you don't, whatever you prefer' type deal).

I could put a link to this issue in our newsletter for this month for example?

[NataliaLKB]

@iteles that sounds like a good idea 👍

[ClaudiaBedin]

I like both the idea of adding a "Would you like us to keep producing a monthly newsletter?" kind of question into our survey and of adding a link to this issue in case people want to contribute a bit more in depth!

[inespons]

@ClaudiaBedin +1

[angiemaguire]

Hey, appreciate the discussion around this. The website is currently a simple static site hosted with github pages. Everyone should have access to the repository but let me know if you have any trouble.

It would be great to discuss this and find out what your needs are. I've got some ideas which make up the basic outline, this includes an events page, a team page, a community page (linking to kindred associations), a blog and a jobs board (inspired by Ladies that UX).

I've created a new issue to get our ideas down. In the meantime if you've got any tweaks to the current page then please feel free.

[angiemaguire]

Let's move website discussions to ladiesofcode/ladiesofcode.com#1

[RabeaGleissner]

As far as I know we can't measure reader stats for our newsletter at the moment, can we? I think that would be the real indicator if we should continue it or not. But yes, I guess asking in the survey is good, although it is easy to just click "yes" and then never read it anyway.

For me LoC is more about the monthly meetups, so I don't think a newsletter is actually necessary. But that's just my personal opinion - I guess we need to discuss strategy!