Every sentence, every story, every post you put into the world as an advocacy or nonprofit communicator is about power. It's about a vision for a different (hopefully better and more just) world and the reader or viewers role in that.
Of course, you say, our action alerts, fundraising emails, and short videos are about power. We want people to do something, give money, and change laws or pressure governments to act.
There's value there. And power to be won and lost. But it's a remote view of how power is created and held. Because power is held by people–actual living breathing humans–and people define and use power in relationship to each other. Even the most conservative, retrograde, or seemingly corrupt political leader is getting and holding power through, with, and for other people: family, friends, business associates, voters.
Our communications–our stories and words and video and images–are not just individual artifacts to optimize for persuasive power and conversion rates. They are how most organizations interact with people. They're how we create, grow, show and hold power. No pressure.
Stories craft relationships. Then power.
I like to tell clients and others who will listen (maybe you?) that newsletters have superpowers you won't find in other email and even social media communications.
You own your newsletter list and can use it how you like. It's a direct conduit into someone's attention span. Your story and how you tell it are, unlike social platforms, generally unfettered by algorithms.
This is true for all email, though, and one reason for the medium's continuing value.
But a newsletter is not simply an email. It is a container that can be take on many shapes and be filled with all sorts of stories and data and images and emotions. A newsletter can be quiet or loud. It can be about the same one thing every time. Or it can curate a garden of delights, news, insights for the reader.
A newsletter can have its own name and brand. It can be the home for a distinct voice and creator, someone that readers want to connect with again and again. A newsletter can, compared to advocacy, update, and fundraising emails, roam and live free. It can be there for people who would never otherwise find you. It can have a hook that slowly (or maybe all at once) reels people in.
A newsletter, by virtue of showing up again and again, can do more than say hello. It can expose you enough to let people trust you. And like a professor who is there for class every Tuesday and Thursday at 1 pm it can teach, inspire, entertain, and offer the help your people need.
And a newsletter, with some coaching and preparation, can raise money in ways that complement your other fundraising channels. A newsletter can recruit new audiences. It can, by virtue of its own value, justify a monthly subscription or donation from people who may think of giving to your cause. And unlike social media posts (which can be fabulous, don't get me wrong), it's so easy to add a link to an email newsletter. You just do it.
Super. But not really that special.
I'm struck writing this by how much my sense of what's fun, cool, useful and (yes) super about newsletters is not about newsletters at all. It's about what's missing from most advocacy and nonprofit communications: trust, voice, purpose, transparency, intimacy, mania, uniqueness, reliability, a camaraderie of you and me...we're in this together.
So much communications is forgettable, even by our most dear supporters, because it speaks but doesn't listen. It tells. Doesn't show. It seeks to please so it rarely challenges. It's written for everyone. So it delights and inspires approximately no one.
You can, of course, communicate like this in any format or medium. That's one reason newsletters aren't special. You want to traverse the heights and depths of emotion with a story the hooks people? By all means, start the camera and record video for an IG reel or TikTok.
That video could even get shared. Go viral. Bounce you to thousands or millions of followers. It's doing the work. But it will, I promise, get lost in the feed.
The newsletter has become a unique container for communicating "in these times." You have space to go big (or small) and even to abandon at least some constraints that can limit your story's power. You can test. Explore. And you get the data you need while retaining some control over if, when, and how the communication happens.
Relationships, not communications
Communications is a tactic. And communications is an essential skill for everyone on staff. Yet we build whole teams and departments of professional communicators who specialize in branding, messaging, design, marketing, media, public relations, writing, and more.
Relationships and power are often a missing through line. We can build a memorable tag line to capture attention and a space in memory. But we often struggle to craft stories that draw and keep people in the work.
But this is about newsletters, not reorganizing your communications department. I'll leave you with this: newsletters are a useful space, a gym if you will, for developing and practicing your relationship muscles in a communication program.