What different is.

👋 Hi. This is Ted. Welcome to new subscribers Shea, Laurel, Ellie, Shawn, Kara, and Nicolina. Thank you for being here!

☎️ Calling all Future Community Members...I'm in the middle of a September membership drive at Future Community. The goal is 30 now 24 paid members in September. Visit Bright+3 and click the Subscriber or Join Future Community buttons.

There are two membership levels. One for job seekers and their supporters. Another for folks wanting to dig into comms, community, and our events.

30 paid members gives Future Community resources to plan for and create value-centered content and events in year-end and 2027. One of my goals is keeping Future Community Jobs useful AND available to everyone. This helps make that happen.

Hey, you can consider this the low key subscriber only announcement about the next Newsletter Nerd Club, a 90 minute workshop at which you'll build a newsletter.

​We'll cover goals, audiences, content creation, design, hosting, cadence, revenue, metrics, and testing. And you'll leave with a plan, drafts, and notes for creating or refreshing a newsletter.

This is a limited-capacity paid workshop (except for Future Community Members).

Differentiation. Why and How?

A participant asked "What elements can differentiate your newsletter from the standard nonprofit newsletter?" at the last Newsletter Nerd Club.

What do you think about? What's your answer? I love this question because it opens up so many ways of thinking of and strategizing about audience communications.

First: Why differentiation? Nobody wants their message, their work, their brand to get lost in the crowd. You want to be memorable. Not forgettable. I think it's too easy to view differentiation as a design and feature problem. Change the colors. Change the logo. Change the whitespace. Or include a poll. A link to a video. An editor's note.

All of this can set a newsletter or any other communications product apart. It can differentiate. It can be memorable. This is a necessary part of the project. But it's not sufficient.

Second: How to differentiate? Deliver a product the user, reader, audience can use. Know the audience. Understand their needs. Ask questions. Listen. Evolve alongside them - sometimes as instigator, other times as empathizer.

Designs, elements, and features will appear and work (or not) as you come to know the audience.

The time of community newsletters

Local news and newsletter products often seem too small to attend to, learn from, and support. But in a comms world that talks more and more about trust we're missing out if we don't notice and get involved in what's right in front of us.

Last week I talked to Charlotte Salley who runs Charlottesville's own Hot Bones newsletter. The lede? Hot Bones is a:

Bite-sized newsletter breaking down sustainable living trends and headlines for the Charlottesville area and beyond.

Charlotte in Charlottesville runs Hot Bones on the side. Mostly at night. Especially Thursday nights (I totally understand 😆). Many if not most community newsletters have similar hours. During the day Charlotte is Director of Partnership Content at The Cooldown.

Charlotte moved to Charlottesville a couple years ago and wanted to connect with and give back to their new home with a newsletter that brought people together around sustainability.

Hot Bones certainly has a voice and point of view. Super sad true book report (an edition from earlier this summer) dives into Norman Maclean's book Young Men and Fire. A personal story and perspective on Maclean's writing shepherds us into today's summer–one filled with wildfire smoke as far south as Charlottesville, Virginia.

Dear reader, there are many many ways to tell the story of today's climate change and wildfires. We don't always need to center our present fear, impacts, and need for action. Charlotte writes:

The Mann Gulch fire happened on August 5, 1949, and nearly 77 years later it’s hard to see if we can answer Maclean’s big question in the affirmative: “Did any good, any good at all, come of this?”

The role of community newsletter and personal storyteller, someone who can connect Maclean's story of 1949 smokejumpers with 2026 climate change, is grounding us in big human sensemaking whether they know it or not.

What's next? Charlotte and I talked about some ways to connect communities, advocates, and local creators. Those connections are hard for small orgs and smaller newsletter teams (like a volunteer part-timer) to make or sustain.

Reach out if you have ideas, plans, or resources to share on that front.

Now get on over to Hot Bones.

Bright Ideas ☀️

Smart people with big ideas and a few great events...don't miss these.

1/ It's Wendell Berry appreciation month. Did you not know? Last week I shared an early Wendell Berry poem. Today I encourage you to check out Have You Heard of Wendell Berry? Landon Frye shares his story about learning of, reading, corresponding with, and finally meeting Wendell Berry on Berry's Kentucky farm in 2023.

2/ Money Trail is a podcast produced by Lex Roman of Revenue Rulebreaker. The pod digs into the people and interests behind the tech tools powering small businesses and many nonprofits, campaigns, and movements. Story design is unique and, I think, brilliant for the topic at hand. Lex is crowdfunding the launch with a first episode available to backers. Anyone check out the announcement and a trailer on LinkedIn.

3/ Text or video? Maybe both. It depends on the audience and knowing what they need or how they learn. Research: Experts prefer text but videos help novices: an analysis of the utility of multi-media content.

4/ Dems have to talk to her but I doubt many are happy about it. A profile of Jennifer Welch, the "Profane ‘Mother’ of the Dirtbag Left." [Katherine Stoffel / GQ]

5/ Words everywhere but it's never been harder to read. I get it. Embrace useful friction is one of my favorite suggestions in It shouldn't feel impossible to finish a book by Adam Clark Estes in Vox. Friction is underrated.

6/ If you're looking for more on the hows and whys of longform reading check out Practical Guide On Reading For The Epicly Phone Addict Doom-scroller in Mohammed Rayaan's newsletter The Fiction Emailer.

7/ A lovely heart-opening piece on grief, ritual, and living without a grandmother from Erin Eberle.

Events and Training

• Washington, DC: Breaking Up With Big Tech: A Club to Help You Through It is a free in person and online project put together by the DC Public Library.
• Online: Protecting Democracy's Data digs into why protecting the US Census is essential to democracy. September 23rd from Data & Society.
• New York City (Climate Week): Imagined Futures is happening in various places in person from Sep 19 to 27.
• Washington, DC: Nonprofit Tech Connect, Speed Networking & Knowledge Sharing event on September 22nd.
• Portland: Frank xPortland is October 15th at Portland's Ecotrust Building.
• Chiang Mai: Splice Beta: Fork It!, a space for space for creators, innovators, media entrepreneurs, is November 26-28.

Want to get your event or training out to the Future Community network? We're happy to share. Click reply and make sure we know about it.

Future Community Jobs

A Future Community Jobs email enters inboxes on Tuesdays but here are a few recent roles of note.

• Senior Manager, Communications : The National Audubon Society [Washington, DC / New York City / Chicago / Oakland]
• Vice President of Community Engagement : Conservation Colorado [Denver, CO] ⏱️ October 9
• Audience Editor, Climate and Science : The New York Times [New York City]
• Communications Officer : The Henry Smith Foundation [London] ⏱️ September 21
• Chief Development Officer : Potomac Conservancy [Bethesda, MD] ⏱️ September 24

The full Future Community job list is always on and updated.

Ted here. I run Bright+3 where we give changemakers the ideas, inspiration, and tools to create content that builds stronger communities. I also write this newsletter (aka Future Community) and run the Future Community Jobs list.