How to Get Ideas for an Employee Newsletter

An employee newsletter is an efficient means of sharing information within an organization. Besides office news, you can also use the newsletter to highlight employees' personal accomplishments. Creating fresh, interesting copy for each issue is a breeze if you know where to look.

Difficulty:

Easy

Instructions

1. Frequent the lunch room. Going where the employees go is the first step in finding out what's going on. Hanging around in the lunch room while employees relax and chat about their day will present several story ideas. Also, in the lunch room, people are more likely to talk about their child's graduation or the choir they just joined. These are excellent topics to pursue for short articles in an employee newsletter.

2. Attend meetings. Meetings may be boring and take up a lot of time, but you can get excellent feature article ideas for your newsletter from them. Just listen to the discussion about ongoing projects and their milestones, so you can formulate questions to ask in an interview with one of the employees.

3. Talk to decision makers. It's helpful to drop in on the major decision makers in the organization once in a while to get a feel for what they think is important. Just ask a simple question like, "What projects have been recently completed?" and you'll get some good ideas for your newsletter.

4. Send out surveys. You don't want to clog the office email system with unnecessary banter, but sometimes it's a good idea to send out a brief survey to all employees. For instance, in the spring you can ask for some information about anyone's family member who is graduating. The survey should take about five minutes to fill out and will give you information you can use in an upcoming issue of your newsletter.