I was recently approached by a professional membership organization about turning their newsletter into a blog. Thinking the task would be easy, I agreed. With 20/20 hindsight, I think I gained more insights and benefits the conversion process than they paid for.
Many bloggers have or are adding newsletters to their blogs, expanding their publicity and access beyond their blog. My challenge was to think in the reverse: Take a long-established newsletter and turn it into a blog.
Arrogantly, I assumed that the structure of their newsletter would make the process of conversion to blog format much easier. After all, they have a regular structured format, categorized and redundantly published information each month, and they are a structured organization. This should be a breeze.
It wasn’t.
Over the next week or so, I’m going to share with you the lessons I learned converting a traditionally formatted membership newsletter into a blog. Hopefully, you will learn more about how you blog, what you blog, and how to categorize and structure your blog’s information in the process.
The Newsletter Structure
The newsletter is for a business women’s association. The redundant “columns” of content are:
- President’s Message
- Meeting Information
- Meeting Minutes
- Membership List
- Committee List
- Board of Directors List
- Contact Information
- Fundraising
- Member Information and Activities
- Committee Information, Reports, and Activities
- Articles by Members
- Event Information
- National Events
- Regional Events
- Local Events
- Calendar
- Tips and Advice for Members
The first challenge was to determine which of these would become posts, article information published on the blog in chronological order, and which of these would become Pages, pseudo-static web pages with the information most commonly needed by members and visitors.
Pages Versus Posts
In order to understand how a blog works compared to a printed newsletter, I had to explain the differences between a post and a Page.
A Page holds timeless information, information that is frequently needed and referenced by users. From the above list, we culled the following to be Pages:
- Membership List
- Committee List
- Board of Directors List
- Contact Information
- Calendar
From this list, we created the following Pages:
- About: Contains information about the group, such as their mission and purpose statement, location, when they meet, description of activities, and a summary of what the group is about. We included the list of board members on the About Page, too.
- Committees: The group does a lot of its work by committees, thus they wanted a specific Committee Page to feature committee chairs, descriptions of the committee activities, and contact information to get involved with each committee. Under the Committee Page, a group of subPages can be formed, one for each committee.
- Membership List: This is a list of the members in the group – however, the decision to publish their names and contact information brought up privacy issues. It seemed that it was okay to include names, addresses, phone numbers, and birth dates in a printed newsletter, but on the web, security became an issue. They’ve decided to contact their members and include phone numbers and obfuscated email addresses if the members agree to release that information. They may decide to make that Page “private”, accessible only by password.
- Contact: After much debate over whether the Contact Page should have all the contact information for board members, committee chairs, and such, they decided to limit the Contact Page to those associated only with membership and the website. For more specific contact information, they would go to the About or Committee Page.
- Calendar: The Calendar Page is the one they realized would be the most visited Page by the membership. A constantly updated Page, it would host basic information on upcoming meetings, events, fundraisers, and various deadlines the group needs to be reminded of. They had several choices in format, but stuck with a simple list of the events under each date rather than a formal, and often difficult to edit, calendar structure.
The rest of the information in the list would be posts, articles and reports which are published when available, since they tell the ongoing story of the association.
It was in the publishing of posts that we ran into our biggest problems, which I’ll introduce you to tomorrow.
Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog Series
- Converting a Newsletter Into a Blog
- Newsletter to Blog: Turning Article and Reports Into Blog Posts
- Newsletter to Blog: Establishing The Post Categories
- Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part I
- Newsletter to Blog: Converting to Blog Posts Part II
- Newsletter to Blog: Quoting, Referencing, Citing, and Not Copyright Violating
- Newsletter to Blog: Blogger’s Friend – The Text Editor
- Newsletter-to-Blog: Converting Old Newsletters and The Benefits of Conversion
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