If You Stopped Sending Your Newsletter, Would Anyone Notice?

Before you start the next issue, ask yourself this: if your newsletter quietly stopped arriving, how many donors would call to ask what happened?

For a lot of organizations, the honest answer is close to zero. Donors care about the work, but the newsletter isn't really written for them. It's written about the organization, and it reads like it.

For a small shop, fixing this doesn't take more time or a bigger budget. It takes a different idea of what the newsletter is for, and a structure simple enough that one person can produce it every quarter without dreading it.

Two kinds of newsletters

Most nonprofit newsletters fall into one of two types.

The first is the organizational news newsletter. Open one and you'll usually find a letter from the executive director, a welcome to new board members, a staff anniversary, an events calendar, and a photo from the annual golf outing. Every item is true. Most of it is interesting to the people who work there.

The second is the donor impact newsletter. It answers one question a donor has after giving: what happened because of me? Every story points back to something the reader made possible.

Tom Ahern, who has spent years teaching nonprofits how to write donor communications, puts it bluntly in his workshop materials: "Your newsletter is not about your organization." In a 2005 conference session covered by Nonprofit Pro, he said donors want to know two things: accomplishments ("What did you do with my money?") and vision ("What could you do with my money?"). He also described a "you" test: "The most powerful word in the English language is 'you,'" and a donor newsletter should use it constantly.

That's practitioner advice, not a controlled study. But it matches a simple bit of logic. Your board member reads the newsletter because they're invested in the organization. Your $100 donor reads it to find out whether their gift mattered. If the newsletter doesn't answer that, they have no reason to keep reading, and over time they stop opening it.

Why org news feels safer (and why donors don't miss it)

I see a few reasons organizations default to the news format.

It's easier to fill. Board changes, events, and staff updates happen on their own. Impact stories have to be gathered.

It feels more humble. Saying "you did this" to a donor can feel like flattery, especially when staff did the daily work. But the donor isn't claiming credit for tutoring a child or rehabbing a dog. They're asking whether their part counted. Telling them it did is simply accurate.

It satisfies internal audiences. The program director wants their new initiative mentioned. The board chair wants a photo. Before long, the newsletter is a compromise among internal stakeholders, and the donor is an afterthought.

The test is easy. Pull your last issue and count how many times it says "we" or "our" and how many times it says "you." If "we" wins by a wide margin, you have an organizational newsletter.

A newsletter structure one person can produce

Imagine a hypothetical county animal shelter with a part-time development coordinator who has maybe eight hours a quarter for the newsletter. Here's a four-page print structure (one 11x17 sheet folded) that fits that time budget. The same content works as a short email series.

Page 1: One lead story, with a headline that credits the donor. Pick one animal, one family, or one outcome. Write 300 to 400 words. The headline should tell the whole story and include the donor, such as "You gave Biscuit a second chance at walking" rather than "Spring Update" or "Medical Fund Report." Ahern recommends headlines of eight words or fewer. A good test is whether a donor who reads only the headline still gets the point.

Page 2: "What you made possible this quarter." Four or five short items, two to three sentences each, with a number in each one where you have it: animals adopted, surgeries funded, foster homes added. Write them to the reader. "Your gifts covered 31 spay and neuter surgeries" lands differently than "The clinic completed 31 surgeries."

Page 3: A behind-the-scenes piece and a look ahead. Half the page goes to something donors wouldn't otherwise see: what a typical intake morning looks like, or why the shelter switched to a new vaccine protocol. The other half is the vision piece. What problem is coming next, and what could donors help solve? This isn't a hard ask. It's letting them see where the work is headed.

Page 4: Thanks, and a way to respond. A short note of thanks signed by a real person, a photo, and a simple way to give or get involved. Ahern argues that the more a newsletter makes donors feel their impact, the more money it raises, so include a reply envelope or a giving link. Just keep the page from turning into an appeal.

Notice what's missing: the board roster, the staff anniversary, the events calendar. If those matter, put them on your website or in a board update.

The production calendar

Eight hours a quarter only works if you're not starting from a blank page. Here's one way to spread it out:

• Weeks 1 to 4 (ongoing, 15 minutes a week): Keep a story file. Every time a staff member mentions a good moment, write down two sentences and who to talk to. The 10-minute story interview is a good way to get the details you need without taking much of anyone's time.
• Week 5 (2 hours): Pick the lead story and do one short interview. Pull the quarter's numbers from your program staff.
• Week 6 (3 hours): Write all four pages. Write the headlines last.
• Week 7 (2 hours): Have one person outside development read it as a donor would, then lay it out in a simple template you reuse every issue.
• Week 8 (1 hour): Send to print and mail. Break the lead story and the "what you made possible" items into two or three emails over the following month.

Reusing the same template every quarter is what makes this sustainable. You're filling in sections, not designing a publication from scratch.

Who should get it

A donor impact newsletter is written for people who have already given. In his slides, Ahern presents a formula that recommends sending the donor newsletter to current donors and using it for impact reporting. For a small shop, that has a practical upside: a shorter mailing list keeps printing and postage manageable.

If you also have volunteers, event attendees, and people who signed up on your website, consider a lighter email update for them. Your donors deserve the version that reports on what they made possible.

Try this before your next issue

Don't redesign anything yet. Take your most recent newsletter and do three quick things.

First, run the "you" count. Second, read each headline by itself and ask whether a donor who read nothing else would know their gift made a difference. Third, cross out every item that only matters to people inside the organization.

Whatever survives is the start of your next issue. If very little survives, that's useful to know too. It probably explains why your newsletter isn't missed when it's late.

If you want to go further on this, Stop Telling Donors What You Need covers the same shift from talking about the organization to showing donors their impact, and it applies to every piece you send, not just the newsletter.

This is one part of a healthy email program. For the full picture, see the guide to nonprofit email marketing.