How to make your club a direct mail newsletter
After all, you already have the mailing addresses of your members. The only thing to do and the bulk of your work will lie is in the production of it by engaging commercial printing services from a reliable commercial printing company. If you know how to design and do the layout of the newsletter then all you need is to gather data. Nevertheless, if not, you will need to find a graphics designer who can do the job for you. You can hire a student who is already prolific in design because the creative fees are not too high. Going to a professional design house could really be expensive because a newsletter is a tedious job to do. Since members of an orchid society are predominantly older females, they might like cutesy, scrapbooking stuff. That would entail a lot of work. Hiring a professional will be expensive because one project will take up so much of their time and resources.
Now, if you are going to start data gathering, here are some of the things you need to consider. First, you should divide the pages. For example, the average newsletter for a social club like the Orchid Society is eight pages. You can reserve two pages for news, four pages for feature articles, and two pages for social events or a photo story. The front cover should contain the biggest event of the club. It could be the induction ceremony or a charitable event the club organized or spearheaded. The feature articles could be about a member that was recently recognized in another field of endeavor or some write-ups about noteworthy gardens or plants in the locality or abroad. Just make sure that you credit your sources, especially the photographs, even if this is just a local newsletter. The photo story could take up the center spread for better presentation since it is not cut in the middle. Gather photographs of your members and their activities for the last period since the previous issue. If this is the first issue, just limit your photos to the most recent photographs that are enough to fill up two pages.
If you are going to mail out your newsletters to your members, you can send them in a short brown envelope or folded into 1/3 size so that you can insert it in a regular letter envelope. If you are going to use the first option, then expect to pay more for the postal fees because of the big envelope size. At least you will not have a problem with folding. If you are going to fold the newsletter, you have to make sure that the photos do not fall on the folds so that the members’ faces are not distorted. The members will have to unfold and flatten the material before reading but then that is the only way that you could save money for the club. Direct mail newsletters are great tools for your members to be updated about what is the latest in the club. It is not a difficult endeavor and will surely help build up the club and its members.
