A couple of weeks ago, I shared some tips from other nonprofit communicators on how to communicate internally at your organization as well as other resources on getting people to meet deadlines and the best communications apps to use.
Today I am sharing the internal newsletter used by Community Partners in LA. Lauren Kay, director of communications, shared this with me about their newsletter:
“We’ve been growing and now have a staff of 42. We have so much going on, it was becoming clear that just sharing information in meetings was not sufficient to keep everyone informed in the way they needed to be and in a way that would build cohesion and connection.
A couple of months ago, we launched an internal news bulletin – a simple email that goes out every other week from the communications team (just the 2 of us!).
We needed to build cohesion and connection among staff, and to also create another method of keeping everyone informed about our work. Despite a robust rotation of various meetings, it seemed there were still staff members who were missing out on information.
We considered taking notes and sending out summaries of each meeting to everyone, or even going back to twice-a-month staff meetings, but neither solution was very appealing.
Finally, we landed on this idea of a simple, internal news bulletin, generated by communications staff, but informed by various staff members. It was just an idea, not fully fleshed out, but we decided to just throw it out there and see what everyone thought after a couple of weeks.
We recruited reps from various functional areas and now ask them each week to provide updates that would be of interest to the entire staff. These are provided in brief, with snappy headers, and when we can, we offer a little news of personal interest.
Elisa Perez our Senior Communications Specialist, is hands-on in info-gathering and getting the bulletin out to staff twice a month.
It’s become a very helpful way to remind staff about basic issues everyone needs to know around the office, from basic operations to HR issues. But it also keeps everyone, irrespective of function area, engaged and informed about projects in the works and how we’re connecting in the community. We throw in some personal milestones about staff (if they’re open to it) just to keep it fun and personal.”
Here’s an example of what they share in their newsletter (active links have been removed):
Here’s what’s going on around the office week of 2/25/19:
Program
· NEWSLETTER SCHEDULE – Deadlines for getting information to the communications team for each monthly issue of the Catalyst can be viewed on our editorial calendar, available here: U:CommunicationsNews & Newsletters 2019. Feel free to suggest a topic or let us know if there are project events or activities we should plan for in the months ahead.
Human Resources
· MID-YEAR REVIEWS – Supervisors, please turn in finalized mid-year reviews to Andrew by this Friday, March 1.
· PAYLOCITY – The first Paylocity announcement was released to projects and core staff last week. Click here to view in case you missed it. Stay tuned for core staff training coming soon.
· OPEN POSITIONS – Don’t forget to share these two open finance positions with your networks.
Operations
· IT SERVICES – Ravi and Teaa are available for IT support while we continue our search to fill the IT Specialist position (job posting coming soon!). Please continue to submit tickets for computer and printer issues through FreshDesk. Ravi will respond to these issues and will refer to Readius should the issue escalate. For assistance with conference room a/v setup, both Ravi and Teaa are available to help. No ticketing necessary for a/v requests at this time.
· CONFERENCE ROOM LAPTOPS & A/V – Beginning Monday, March 4 conference room laptops will be available for checkout at the front desk. Each conference room will have a designated laptop and webcam. Additional laptops will be available for general use in the coming weeks. Also, please note that remote controls for the TVs in Suite B and D have been mounted, making it easier to turn the TV off/on, adjust volume, and switch video inputs. A training on conference room a/v will be announced sometime in March.
· INTO THE FUTURE – Curious to know what the Opps team is up to this year? Take a look at the Trello Timeline 2019.doc to see what improvements are in store.
People Stuff
· HEY! TEACHER! – Dianne’s going to be teaching at Claremont Graduate University’s Drucker School of Management’s Arts Management program starting April 4.
Thanks so much for sharing Lauren and Elisa!
