Employers and employees share a future, but their visions of that future and the way it will be pursued may be quite different. While their goals may be complementary, they can have distinctly different views about the means of achieving the ends, and about the sharing of rewards.
Thus, we expect readers to bring at least some degree of unwillingness to employee newsletters. The degree of unwillingness will vary from organization to organization, depending on factors such as history and culture.
Membership newsletters
For membership newsletters, unwillingness may stem either from lack of interest in the affairs of the organization or from reluctance to make a commitment.
Many organizations, especially those that use a lot of volunteer labor, use newsletters to ask for help with tasks. But volunteering can require sacrifice, commitment, and the acceptance of unpleasant tasks.
Of course, unwillingness also may arise from other sources, including conflicting views about ends or means, styles of leaders vs. followers, and feelings of neglect or unwarranted attention. And if consistency levels for the organization (as expressed by its elected officers or staff) and a bloc of members is low, then some unwillingness will exist.
Frequency
Those are a few reasons why readers might be unwilling to respond to different types of newsletters. With that in mind, we can look at how this issue of willingness relates to frequency, or number of issues per calendar period.
The most common frequencies for printed newsletters are monthly and quarterly; and there is also bi-monthly (every two months), which is less common. These standards developed over time, and among many thousands of publishers, so we can say they're well tested.
Anything published less frequently than quarterly probably won't have much impact: It simply won't appear often enough to influence readers. At the high-frequency end of the range, few publishers expect gains from publishing more frequently than monthly. Conventional wisdom holds that readers will tire of a message if it's sent too often.
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©Robert Abbott, 2007 All Rights Reserved
