![]() Get on a regular schedule of producing content, even if its small. It’s perfectly acceptable to release your first email newsletter with only 3 articles and a few helpful links. ![]() Don’t Make it too LongĬreating an IT Newsletter can seem very overwhelming at first. For any how-to articles, include a short video clip walking users through doing something. If possible, include imagery from inside your organization. Include an image with each article that provides a visual representation of what the article is about. If you want your IT newsletter to be read and be helpful it needs to be enticing and visually appealing. I’ve seen so many IT groups try and create newsletters that were plain text (and boring), because the sysadmins and security don’t like HTML emails. You could have one article that is a “how-to”, one article that is a story about “how jane used data analytics to meet quarterly results”, and one that explains an audit requirement like “5 things you need to know about audit control 3.4.5.” Use Imagery and Multimedia While you may follow a general theme “like meeting audit requirements” consider what types of articles can help meet compliance. When developing your content strategy, it can also be useful to vary your content throughout the newsletter. If there are quarterly financial reports due, create articles like “how to leverage the company intranet to submit your reports on time” For instance, if you are going through an audit, include information that is relevant to helping end users meet audit requirements. Know what’s going on in the larger organization and line up your newsletter content to match. Your newsletter may ultimately fail or reach a narrow audience if you don’t plan your content well. I might actually read an article titled “5 tips for submitting your departmental budget.” Make sure you write to draw the attention of non-IT staff. As an IT professional, why would you read a newsletter from the finance department? Personally, I would only read it if I thought there was something relevant that would help me get my job done. One other way you can approach this is to pretend that you are reading a newsletter from another group. Then, you’ll be able to come up with a newsletter article similar to “Having trouble resetting your password, here’s three tips make it easier” If you need to, talk to a few people about why they are having trouble understanding the requirements that they need to follow. Approach the situation from their point of view. Instead of writing about “password requirements for organization x”, put yourself in their shoes. If you want end users to get better at password management, you must approach it from their point of view. In order to create interest, you must be in the mindset of helping your end users. Working on a newsletter “as time permits” will rarely lead to a successful outcome. This means assigning specific tasks to specific people due on a certain date. Know this at the beginning and make a real commitment to publish on a regular basis. It is a commitment to providing communication to end users on a regular interval that will help them be more successful. A newsletter (or regular communication) is not a service desk ticket that must be resolved and forgotten. The problem with the reactionary approach is that it is very difficult to maintain the initial motivation and momentum that comes from trying to fix a problem. We see that end users don’t know something they should, so we immediately go into fix-it mode and try to blast out our vast amount of IT knowledge to the rest of the organization. After all, how many times have you said, “if a user just knew x, we could have avoided this whole situation”? As IT professionals we are often predisposed to be a “fixer”. The need for a newsletter often comes as a reaction to some specific event. Use the right-hand menu to navigate.) Make a Commitment (This tutorial is part of our IT Leadership & Best Practices Guide. If you are thinking about doing this in your organization, consider these tips to help make it worth the time invested. To help improve communications, many groups try and produce a regular newsletter to provide the boarder organization with more information about what’s going on in IT. ![]() I’ve yet to see an IT group that is 100% happy with the level of communication it has with the rest of the organization. Automated Mainframe Intelligence (BMC AMI).Control-M Application Workflow Orchestration.Accelerate With a Self-Managing Mainframe.Apply Artificial Intelligence to IT (AIOps). ![]()
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