“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose/By any other name would smell as sweet.”
–William Shakespeare
“What’s your name? Who’s your daddy?”
–The Zombies
So you’re launching a newsletter, perhaps for engaging with your customers or for cementing a bond with your most important asset, your employees.
Your newsletter should reflect the essence of what your company and its employees represent. So what you name it should be consistent with your organization’s values and mission.
If you’ve never produced a newsletter, understand that it will challenge you in many ways. You will gain insight into what journalists on deadline go through as they do their parts to “feed the beast,” as they say. Content is king – and you are its put-upon subject.
In some ways, your task as a writer/editor for an in-house newsletter is more difficult than that of a journalist. He or she might have an editor or two to satisfy; you could have layers of bosses who will second, third and fourth guess your choice of words before and after publication.
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
Look at this process as something akin to raising a child. Your beautiful baby is going to spit up, speak his first words, take his first steps, and the next thing you know he’s going off to college.
We want to engage our clients
You overlooked one significant detail. You never gave your baby a name. As a result, he’s going to arrive at his university as a blank canvas, answering only to his six-digit student number.
Of course, we jest. You didn’t forget to name him. He has first, middle and last names. Maybe even a nickname, something he wishes he could leave at home. (Between us, it’s Snoots.)
And so it is with your newsletter. Before we worry about content (the subject of another Perfect Circle post on another day), let’s give your newsletter a name.
No doubt, your newsletter will evolve over time: It might go from two-color to four, from four pages to eight. If it endures, it likely will undergo one or more redesigns. But its name should remain consistent, a steadfast reminder of why you launched the newsletter in the first place.
We’ve developed many a newsletter, and naming them has always been at the forefront of the development process. On a few occasions we’ve hit on great newsletter names without input from a client:
• For Lobar Inc., a general contractor that specializes in school construction, the name “Lobar Ink” immediately went to the head of the class.
• For Rutter’s, which traces its roots to a dairy farm, our designer Tim Baker came up with “Moo’s Letter.”
For the most part, however, particularly when it’s an employee newsletter, we want to engage our clients. We can develop a turnkey newsletter for them, but we can’t do it without them.
We’ll want and need to tap the expertise and insight of many if not all of the client’s employees at one time or another. They will provide us with the information that we will turn into stories, briefs, photos, information graphics.
So in order to engage employees (or customers if it is an external newsletter) right from the start, we like to hold a name-the-newsletter contest.
Drayer Physical Therapy Institute has grown by leaps and bounds since its debut in 2002. Its employee newsletter, Pathfinder, began with just two pages. At the top of the first issue, in lieu of a name, we put a name badge:
Below it was a box announcing a name-the-newsletter contest; the winner received dinner for two.
For Associated Wholesalers Inc., a food distributor to supermarkets and convenience stores, we used another image: “The brown bag at the top of this page is there so you can, metaphorically speaking, fill it with your ideas for what to call this publication.”
The response was so strong that we continued the contest in the next newsletter, when we announced eight finalists that AWI employees then got to vote on. We announced the winning name – AWI Connection – in the third issue.
In each of these two cases, we ended up with newsletter names but we also engaged our target audiences immediately and generated compelling content in the process.
Do you know what we call that? Success.
