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Newsletters are a valuable outreach tool for ATE projects and centers hoping to build relationships and disseminate information. Yet, doing it right requires a lot of foresight, juggling of different types of content and pieces, and focused awareness of your mission, goals, and intended audience. In our July issue of the ATE Central Connection, we featured The WomenTech Educators Newsletter as a wonderful example in terms of the quality and quantity of its content. Donna Milgram, Executive Director of the National Institute for Women in Trades, Technology & Science (IWITTS) shared with us the history, successes, and lessons learned from working on this exemplary e-newsletter. Keep reading for the complete interview, followed by some helpful links on best practices and analytic tools to help create a successful e-newsletter.

ATE Central: Can you tell us a bit about how the newsletter got started? What were the original aims and goals of the project? Who is the intended audience?

Donna Milgram: Our e-newsletter started in 1999; we were among the first nonprofits to harness the power of online marketing to help meet our mission of closing the gender gap for women and girls in STEM. Our goal is to disseminate best practices for recruiting and retaining women and girls in STEM, and our retention strategies work for male students, too. We try to do this in an engaging way for our audience so that we can model what we want them to do. Over time, this has meant including videos and news stories, and creating series such as our 10 Women in STEM Recruitment Mistakes and the 10 Women in STEM Retention Mistakes.

The intended audience is educators, administrators, counselors, and advisors in STEM fields that are traditionally male-dominated, ranging from nanotechnology to auto technology and at all school levels. I shouldn’t have to say this, but I often get asked: Yes, our strategies are for both female and male teachers. After all, it’s mostly male teachers teaching STEM subjects.

ATE Central: How have you built up your audience over time; do you have any tips or tricks to share?

Milgram: We’re lucky; we started early, so yes our 14,000 readers have come to us gradually. Tips and tricks: 1) Create sign-in lists for all your real-time events and ask for permission to add the emails of participants to your newsletter; 2) Have links to your newsletter throughout your website; 3) Have a free gift, such as a white paper, on your homepage where visitors must provide an email address in order to receive it (mine is announced on our homepage by my avatar at www.iwitts.org); 4) Ask sister organizations to share your free report in their newsletters. Of course all of our mailings include an opt-out link, which is required by law.

ATE Central: Do you push the newsletter content or new issue information out through social media? If so what do you use (i.e. Facebook, Twitter)?

Milgram: We do. Our newsletters are linked from our Facebook page and on LinkedIn. Facebook is also a valuable tool for evaluating potential newsletter content. Using the Facebook dashboard, we can easily see which of our recent Facebook posts have received the most “likes,” “shares,” and “comments.” This can give us clues about what content our readers are most likely to find interesting.

ATE Central: How do you select your content? Does it have to meet certain qualifications?

Milgram: We create a newsletter calendar and decide the purpose of each newsletter; then we link content to our goals. Our signature is to provide content that is heavy on practical “How Tos” and newsworthy content of interest to our readers that is otherwise hard to find. We’ve had readers tell us they’ve implemented strategies by reading our newsletter alone.

We also analyze what our newsletter readers like by using e-newsletter analytics and then provide more of that type of content. For example, we learned that our readers love videos of me, especially when I share an “ah-ha” moment of mine, so I do as many videos as my schedule permits.

ATE Central: What have been the biggest challenges in terms of audience, content, management, etc.?

Milgram: One challenge has been that we’ve had the newsletter for so long! We have many subscribers who have been on our list for ten years or more. We want to make sure that we keep the content relevant and interesting for all our readers, whether they just signed up or have been part of our community for many years. In that vein, we keep trying new things, such as an email series with the top five myths about women in STEM. Another example was a Witty Women Wonders monthly quiz, as a fun way of engaging our community and inspiring more women in technology.

ATE Central: What have been your biggest successes?

Milgram: Recently we did a series of emails with the 10 Women in STEM Recruitment Mistakes and the 10 Women in STEM Retention Mistakes. As I spoke and trained around the country, educators told me how much they loved them, and I even got emails from educators who had missed a mistake and asked me to send it to them.

ATE Central: Can anyone subscribe?

Milgram: Yes! Anyone can subscribe. We often have free tools, training, and resources for ATE educators that we publicize through the newsletter thanks to the support of the National Science Foundation. By the way, if you’d like to sign up, just to see what we do in our newsletter so you can emulate this in your field, we’d be flattered.

Hopefully this interview has reaffirmed the strength of e-newsletters as an effective and long-standing marketing tool. Whether you are curious about the best way to get started, or hoping to elaborate on what you are already doing, here are a few resources:

• The University of Washington has created this helpful guide of best practices when it comes to e-newsletter design.
• Google Analytics is a great free resource for tracking what works in your e-Newsletter and how effective your efforts are. This blog post from Distilled offers some helpful guides for beginner, intermediate, and advanced users.
• The Center for Advanced Automotive Technology (CAAT), the Florida Advanced Technology Education Center for Manufacturing (FLATE), and the Technology and Innovation in Manufacturing & Engineering (TIME) Center offer additional examples of successful e-newsletters from the ATE Community.

We'd love to hear from you! Let us know how you’re using newsletters to help promote your ATE work, what works for you as a reader and/or writer, and what other note-worthy newsletters you’ve seen (in or out of the ATE community) in the comments section below.