One of the monthly newsletters I work on: The Alabama Sierran. I did the first newsletter for the Alabama Chapter of the Sierra Club in January 2006 and have done one each month since then. This is an 8 page tabloid-size newsletter printed on recycled newsprint. You can download the full newsletter at alabama.sierraclub.org. In addition to working on this newsletter, I just finished an online newsletter for Birmingham, Alabama based CGH Insurance Group (www.cghinsurance.com/newsletter). And, perhaps most fun right now, I’m working on a website on tourism–particularly historical and ecological–in Bibb County, Alabama. I’m developing it almost entirely in Movable Type (using a little Dreamweaver to help me handle the CSS stylesheets). Pretty interesting stuff. Not that far along yet, but I’ve built the shell: www.bibbtourism.com. Other than that, just the usual blog updates at Your Town Alabama and Alabama’s Front Porches.
newsletters
Alzheimer’s of Central Alabama Newsletter Complete!
This newsletter is one that I do only about 2 times each year. It is a pretty good sized newsletter with lots of input, so it takes a while to complete: very pleased with this issue, both design-wise and content-wise. We managed to add in more reference, teaching-oriented information into this issue than ever before (at least since I’ve been doing the newsletter–and that’s been about 5 years).
Reaching 10,000 People in One Month
I’ve been busier with newsletters this month even more so than usual. I’ve completed the Alzheimer’s of Central Alabama Spring 2008 newsletter (complete with a redesign), the April 2008 issue of the Sierra Club’s Alabama Sierran, the Birmingham Chapter of the American Institute of Architects Birmingham Chapters March newsletter, a Your Town Alabama newsletter and CGH Insurance Group’s newsletter. Who knows, I may be forgetting a newsletter.
Some of these go out via mail (about 9,500 of them) and about another 1,000-1,200 go out via email. (Both of the mailed newsletters do get posted on the respective websites, so they get additional views as well.)
Anyway, I was adding up the number of people these go out to collectively and I realized that, probably for the first time, I’ve hit the 10,000 person mark for newsletter communications. It just seems pretty cool to me. No real significance to it, really, but I find it secretly pleasing.