What the hell do I want from our organization's newsletter?
Newsletters or expert organizations without clear intent are just another dead channel.
This is exactly the question we need to ask ourselves the moment we decide that our expert organization (a think tank, an advocacy NGO, a research center) needs its own newsletter.
The answer to this question is rare. But what’s even rarer is the fact that anyone bothers to ask it at all.
One thing worth mentioning is that your newsletter is the only channel you actually own, not rent.
As Nicole Fox put it in her piece Owning Your Corner of the Internet:
“Platform dependency is what happens when your visibility lives primarily on infrastructure you don’t own.”
There’s something worth sitting with here:
The volatility of social media platforms and their algorithms.
The ethical concerns around some of them (most of them).
The shifting regulations (hello, Meta and NGOs in Europe, where you can no longer promote anything touching civic issues, rights, or elections).
The impossibility of reaching your own followers without paid promotion.
The tyranny of format: With all due respect to the trends, not every message fits in a 30-second video.
All of this pushes organizations toward building their own channels: publishing platforms, newsletters, events, and so on.
These are the infrastructural reasons to create a newsletter for your expert organization. But there’s another question — the question of functional intent, and what follows from it: concrete decisions, concept, format, and content. And more often than not, this is exactly where things go wrong.
When you subscribe to an organizational newsletter, in 9 out of 10 cases, you end up reading something that feels like it was created for no one in particular and for reasons nobody can clearly explain.
Just the ritual production of content because somewhere in a strategy document, “newsletter” exists as a checkbox that must continue reproducing itself indefinitely.
Three Diagnoses
Diagnose #1. No intention.
Why did you create your corporate newsletter? What are you trying to do with it?
Share our expertise — that’s the most common answer. And the saddest one. Because it’s not an answer. It’s a line in an annual plan, and then a line in an annual report.
Expert organizations struggle with goal-setting. What trips us up is the absence of an obvious goal, the kind traditional b2b and b2c companies have: generate profit, which subordinates all communications to a single purpose (or a complex of interconnected ones) — to become a stage in a marketing funnel.
Even nonprofits with private fundraising have it easier. They, too, have a clear goal, and it works structurally and functionally like a commercial one.
But what if you’re a think tank? A research center? An advocacy NGO?
That’s exactly when we surrender to the comfortable arms of “share our expertise.” Or worse — “increase reach and brand awareness.”
These are direct quotes. Real answers I’ve heard from real people. Increase reach? Seriously?!
“Across all sectors bulk emails take a variety of shapes and sizes, but are almost invariably boring. From multinational corporations to big international NGOs, institutions around the world offer the experience of either being inundated with irrelevant information once a week on a Friday or receiving a 16-page round-up email once a month.”
Source:
What’s wrong with think tank bulk emails, and how can it be put right?, WonkComms / Medium.
What can the goal of a newsletter be for an expert organization?
One important thing to mention: goal-setting always depends on context (your audience, your organizational goals, which should be the foundation for any communication decision). There are too many variables, so the examples I’ll give will reflect that diversity. It also matters who you’re making the newsletter for — who is your audience? Experts? Grantees? Policymakers? General public? Who?
Does your organization give grants?
Your newsletter is part of the application funnel, with different goals between open calls and during them.
1. Signal priorities — before the applications arrive
Between open calls, a foundation uses its newsletter to publicly communicate the direction of its strategy. This manages the application flow: the right applicants come to you, the wrong ones don’t waste anyone’s time.
Each issue could be a public statement of strategic intent. You can use it to signal which problems your organization considers urgent or important, which approaches you find compelling, and which kinds of work you are watching.
2. Reduce friction in the application process
When an open call is live, your audience already has intent. They’re not browsing — they’re deciding whether to apply. A newsletter at this stage isn’t about awareness. It’s about conversion. That means answering the questions applicants are too nervous to ask, clarifying what reviewers actually look for, and reducing the ambiguity that makes strong organizations hesitate. The goal is to lower the barrier for the right people to act.
Are you a think tank?
Your newsletter goal could be to be present in the right policy debate at the right moment.
Policy windows don’t stay open long. Decisions get made, positions harden, attention moves on. A think tank newsletter is about staying close enough to decision-makers and influencers that when the window opens, you’re already in the room. Not discovered. Not forwarded by someone else. Already there, already trusted, already read.
The newsletter is the infrastructure that keeps that proximity alive between moments of urgency.
Are you in communications at a research organization?
Your newsletter could be the infrastructure to:
Build a community of peers and maintain trust. A newsletter that consistently delivers relevant, honest, non-promotional content builds the kind of trust that makes your next publication matter and makes people share it before you even ask.
Engage your audience — in research, events, and public debate. Survey respondents, event participants, discussants, public commentators — they come from relationships. A newsletter builds that relationship over time, so when you need people to show up (to a roundtable, a consultation, a public comment period, a survey), they already know who you are and why it matters.
Stay present between the big moments. Major publications and events are your peaks. But audiences have short memories. A newsletter is what keeps you visible and relevant in the valleys between them.
Diagnose #2. The newsletter as a content dump from other channels.
I’m exhausted from fighting the same problems over and over again: copy-pasted texts across social media and newsletters, newsletters without intention, language that sounds like a press release from another decade, generic images of smiling people, and a complete lack of understanding of why any of this exists in the first place.
Polished. Empty. You read it and think, 'Why did I even subscribe?'
Where is your voice? Where is your organization — the one you describe in your mission statement, with all that talk of innovation, openness, expertise? What I’m actually reading is a recap of how great last month’s workshop was, and how you attended a conference. That’s what LinkedIn is for. :)
Diagnose #3. The wrong contract with your audience.
People subscribed to something specific. And then you sent them the same thing they already see on your social media.
Let’s take the grantmaking example. If your organization gives grants, your newsletter might need to do exactly three things:
Tell people when deadlines are coming
Help them understand whether this grant is for them
Give them what they need to write a stronger application
That’s a contract. People subscribed because they wanted those three things — not your monthly update.
You make a promise when you launch a newsletter. And no, “we’ll send something once a month” is not a promise. That’s a schedule. A promise is about value: what will be different for the person who reads this?
What follows from all of this
Before you send a single issue, answer these questions:
1. Why? What is your goal? Not “to share our expertise.” A real goal. What should change (in the field, in your audience, in your organization’s position) because this newsletter exists?
2. Who is your audience (and is it really just one)? This question is more dangerous than it looks. Organizations routinely try to serve policymakers, practitioners, funders, and the general public through a single newsletter, creating one that is wrong for everyone.
3. What’s the value for the subscriber? What does the person on the other end actually get? Be specific. “Staying informed” is not an answer.
4. How do you hold it together? What is the concept that makes every issue recognizably yours? What’s the logic that connects your goal, your audience’s needs, and your content?
5. How will you communicate it? Voice, format, frequency, language. These choices are part of the contract.
6. What happens next? How are you actually planning to grow this thing? Do you really think a button on your website is enough?
For example: remind people regularly across your channels, add a subscription option to your grant application form, integrate your newsletter into every event registration flow, and so on.
Some examples worth looking at:
Council on Foreign Relations — a think tank that solved the audience problem structurally. Instead of one newsletter trying to serve everyone, they offer a set of topic-specific newsletters.
Rockefeller Foundation — same logic: diversification by theme, with a clear value proposition for each stream.
The New Institute — a Hamburg-based think tank focused on ideas beyond capitalism and planetary governance. Their newsletters combine updates on fellows and programs with intellectual content — essays, provocations, reading recommendations.
IEP@BU — Institute for European Policymaking, Bocconi University. Publicly left X for Substack because the platform amplifies polarization. Clear audience: policymakers and researchers. Clear goal: close the gap between academic research and real policy decisions. The platform choice and the content are in the same logic.
FPRI Insights — Foreign Policy Research Institute, Philadelphia. Nearly 14,000 subscribers on Substack. Free weekly digest for everyone, private briefings for members. Their stated goal: demystify the role of think tanks and build trust between researchers and the public.
That's it
Call me old-fashioned, but I believe in intentional communication. And maybe this is obvious, but I see it again and again: institutional newsletters that are nothing more than a LinkedIn feed or a copy-paste of press releases.
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