Observations from the faculty and school workshops often mentioned newsletters. We have distilled these down to two requirements need areas, one being the epic WIP-245 (which focuses on standardising the technologies that is offered and supported) and the other a story WIP-246 (the softer, guidelines to assist users and build capability).

Background

People use a variety of eNewsletter systems around the University - Imera, Campaign Monitor, MailChimp, SmartMailpro (Jericho), Net Community.

A few years ago marketing were using a vendor system called Imera. This was a reskinned version of Campaign Monitor and the charges for sending a newsletter were at a premium rate (4x the base cost). Marketing set up their own instance of CampaignMonitor. Since then other groups in the University have been transitioned onto Campaign Monitor. This saved on send costs and they have been provided with improved templates.

At the time it was expedient to go with Campaign Monitor as the marketing team was in transition and this wasn't the top priority. A variety of groups already used it and it delivered what we were looking for in terms of ease of use, cost and reporting. The original plan had been to assess a variety of online systems; another option could have been MailChimp which the websites team had been using. One of the aims is to get everyone onto the same platform so templates can be shared and it is easier to maintain the brand standards.

VBS were looking at the eNewsletters they were sending - to help support their marketing team we gave them an document with some background and questions. I am not sure if this was ultimately sent to the school or never got past draft.

In May 2015 a new general newsletter (eNewsletter requirements.docx) was designed with a range of options for articles. This template can be used by any team but was set up originally for the alumni newsletter and stakeholder engagement newsletter. Alumni use their own CRM so we are currently finding out if ITS are happy for us to use a plugin to connect to their CRM.

Other

On LALs homesite you can subscribe directly to their newsletter. The database is in Campaign Monitor - they generally get one or two sign ups a week.

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