Part of running a school includes keeping parents, teachers, and students up-to-date on school-related news, activities, and announcements. According to research, students perform better when consistent, open communication exists between schools and parents.
A myriad of methods and tools are available to schools to communicate with parents like parent-teacher conferences, websites, email, phone calls, social media, flyers, and the monthly school newsletter.
What is a School Newsletter?
A school newsletter is a way to inform parents, students, faculty, and the rest of the community about school events, news, and other issues. It can be as complex or simple as you want it to be, as long as the information is informative. The school newsletter has been around for a long, long time and remains relevant in school-to-parent communications.
But, what is the purpose of a school newsletter?
What value are you giving parents by sending them a newsletter every week or every month?
Why is it better than other methods and tools?
Here’s why the school newsletter is a powerful and valuable method of communication:
1. Regular Updates
School newsletters remind families about important dates, promote student achievements, and helps parents understand elements of teaching and learning. Newsletters take on the form of a formal and expected update that is sent from schools to their communities, as opposed to more sporadic communication methods such as emails, text messages, or social media posts.
2. Detailed Information
The level of detail that newsletters offer allows schools to be more informative and descriptive with their school community. Other forms of communication often have to be short and punchy to ensure that the post will capture the reader’s attention.
Newsletters are a great platform to cover those specific topics that require more detail which can’t be shared through other mediums.
3. Parent Connection
Newsletters play a huge role in making parents feel involved in the school. Giving parents a say in what information is presented will build trust between the school and families and further strengthen their involvement.
Even if the parents of the graduated students-and the alumni themselves are no longer involved with the school and its activities, a newsletter is a great way to keep the school at the forefront of their memory.
Bonus tip: When possible, write about specific happenings around the school. A short note from each classroom about a recent activity helps parents feel connected to their child’s classroom.
How to Create a Stunning School Newsletter?
How much effort does it take to create and share your school newsletter?
You spend hours searching for content ideas. You plead faculty members into contributing to the process. You scramble to pull it all together and get it in PDF format. Then you send it out to your students, their parents, and teachers.
Does the process sound familiar?
What happens next?
Does anyone read it?
Do you get any feedback?
Does it disappear into a black hole?
Maybe you’ve got the best-written articles and engaging photos in your newsletter, but it’s not generating much interest or reaction.
So, how do you get busy parents to read your newsletters?
How to make a newsletter for school which actually gets opened and read?
We have the answer! The fastest and easiest way to send visually appealing newsletters that actually get read is through elink.io. Busy parents don’t have time to read your newsletter? Don’t worry! The newsletter will be there as long as you like, and the parents can read it over a cup of coffee when they get the time.
Design a Stunning School Newsletter in these 6 Simple Steps:
With elink.io, you can have a school newsletter ready to go out to your audience in minutes.
Step 1: Choose a Newsletter Template
The coolest thing about elink is that you don’t have to worry about all the tricky design rules. With elink’s stunning newsletter templates, you’re already way ahead when it comes to designing.
Now, here’s what you need to do: choose a template and customize it the way you want. We’ve quite a splendid collection to choose from, so take your time to find the one that fits your needs the best.
By the way, you can also create a newsletter from scratch. It’s totally up to you.
Step 2: Add Links to the Newsletter
Here comes the fun part. You can add links to the content (articles, videos, products, etc.) that you want to show up in your school newsletter.
elink is so robust that it will automatically generate an image, a title, and a short description with each link. Of course, you can modify and customize any of this information if you want.
elink is also an RSS reader and a bookmark manager so you can quickly select your preselected links directly from the link library or the RSS feeds or enter them manually.
Step 3: Add Header
We know that a compelling email header design decides whether the reader would read your entire newsletter or bail on it. That’s why we’ve given you the option of designing your header body the way you want.
You can add images, text, bullet lists, numbered lists, buttons, social icons, and dividers in your header body. elink even lets you choose from over 6 font sizes for your header body.
What’s more? You can also use elink’s Canva integration and design an eye-catching banner directly in elink.
Step 4: Add Footer
An email footer is a place where the recipients would look for details about your brand. It is a place for transparency, clarity, and good design – exactly what elink provides.
You can add images, text, bullet lists, numbered lists, buttons, social icons, and dividers in your footer. Moreover, you can link the social icons with your own social media accounts in seconds.
Step 5: Choose a Layout for your links:
Just jump right in and don’t worry about wasting valuable time designing the layout of your school newsletter. elink has already done all the heavy lifting for you. You can choose your favorite layout from all the different options with a simple click of a button and elink will change the formatting of those tiles to your chosen style.
Step 6: Design and Customize
You’ll get a perfect combination of colors in our templates. But, if you want to change the colors, you can do that too. Apart from that, you can also customize the font styles, button text, and more – in just a few clicks.
One of the most robust features of elink is that you can even add a search bar if you are adding a bunch of links such as resources etc.
Step 7: Share Your Newsletter
Yay! You’ve now created a stunning school newsletter that is ready to be shared with the world. Now, hit the ‘Publish’ button on the far right corner of the screen, and a pop-up will appear, allowing you to customize your content URL.
Once you have customized the URL, another popup will appear where you need to select the ‘newsletter’ option. From there, you can share your masterpiece via Gmail, Mailchimp, or any other third-party email marketing tools like Get Response, Active Campaign, etc.!
Here are few school newsletter examples created via elink:
Example 1:
Example 2:
Example 3:
Check out elink’s free school newsletter templates here:
- Student Projects
- Student Syllabus
- Parent Newsletter
- Project Resources
- Class Resources
- Books to Read
- Updates to Faculty
- Upcoming Birthdays
- Curated Research
Tips on How you Can Make your School Newsletter a Big Success:
Well for one, a school newsletter is a lot more than periodic installations of school-related information. Don’t get us wrong, sharing is great, but you want and need your school newsletters to achieve more than that.
School newsletters are a great communication tool—versatile, reliable, and affordable. And like all tools, they perform the best when used cleverly and with purpose. We will give you some tips to create amazing newsletters:
1. Create relevant, targeted content
People are much more likely to open and read newsletters when they know the information will be relevant to them.
Opening something and reading it are two very different things, as we are aware.
2. Use an engrossing subject line
Your subject line in your email hauls a lot of weight, just like the headline of an article. It may be only 30 – 70 characters, but it performs a big job. Most of the time, people make a decision whether or not to open an email based on the subject of that email.
In general, you want your newsletter subject line to accomplish two things: Let your audience know what is in the email and give them a compelling reason to open the email.
3. Reader-Friendliness
In almost any communication, you should aim to avoid making reading the text seem like a chore. Parents are busy people, and when reading your newsletter seems like a task, they’ll put it to one side, and your messages will go unread. It’s hard to focus on long blocks of text.
So, keep your information short, well-spaced, and save the funky fonts for the headlines. Even articles, interviews, profiles, etc should be limited to 600 words. Less is more. The shorter the newsletter, the more the chances that the parents will read it. Never confuse the newsletter for a blog.
But If you are already swamped with lots of work, hiring a writing service is the smartest thing you can do. Not only will you get to save time but also deliver a really awesome school newsletter!
Over to you!
School newsletters might be the only source of school-related information that some parents get. With so many parents working full-time, with remote education and social distancing, school-gate chats are rare and the chance to catch up with other parents has become rare too.
The once or twice a year parent meeting cannot possibly convey to parents all the highs and lows of a school year. That’s why a newsletter can fulfill this function perfectly.
But, traditional newsletters are time-consuming and costly. Paper and printing alone for a whole school could be onerous where resources are scarce. When they are printed, chances are that they will disappear into students’ bags, get tossed into the trash, or sit on a pile of unread material.
Now that it is super easy to create and share a newsletter online, we believe its time for you to switch from traditional, time-consuming methods. Let us know if you enjoyed creating a school newsletter through Elink by tweeting us @elink.io!
Further reads:
Online Education Tools For Modern Teachers
Ecommerce & Product Newsletter: Ideas, Templates & How to Create!
How to Create an Internal Company Newsletter?
30 Awesome Curated Newsletter Ideas
Best Apps for Teachers To Engage Students
How to Use Content Curation for Education: Infographic
