Case Study
Nueva School Parent Newsletter
Privacy concerns drive the school to inundate the parent newsletter with an overflow of information, resulting in a reduction in its readership.
THE CHALLENGE
Until now, parents received a comprehensive weekly newsletter encompassing all the content scheduled for release that week. When I say "comprehensive," I mean it included absolutely everything—no abridged stories, no post summaries, and no "read more" links. You had to scroll through the entire content to locate what mattered to you.
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Given that the newsletter consolidated content from the lower, middle, and upper schools into a single publication, you can imagine its length. Many parents found it overwhelming and struggled to pinpoint what was relevant to them. While the information was valuable, the utility of the newsletter as a tool for keeping parents informed was diminishing.
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The primary reason for this content overload was the imperative of maintaining privacy. A substantial portion of the information in the newsletter was intended exclusively for parents of the school.
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A previous attempt to condense and archive the newsletter on the website proved to be a vulnerability, potentially exposing private content. This raised concerns about privacy breaches, potential lawsuits, and so forth.
Getting the right help
Amy was retained by Nueva after a complicated website deployment. As I was tracking a list of changes our team wanted to make to the new website, we found ourselves in a position where we did not have the right kind of help to work through such a list. Amy brought her expertise as our website consultant/web administrator to work with our team and bring elegant solutions to the long list that we knew we had. She helped us prioritize what was important, nice to have, and probably not important. She gave us structure, goals and deadlines to both fix the site and put the polish on it.
Dianne Willoughby, Nueva School
THE SOLUTION
The first step was to tackle the privacy issue. Amy was able to demonstrate a way that would allow an archive to exist on the website but in a private area.
The next step was designing a newsletter that the parents would love. Since Amy had solved the privacy issue we were more open to her suggestions on shortening the content. Parents would now see a “summary” and a “read more” link instead of having to sift through content. That still left us with a lot of information.
To organize what was left Amy designed custom graphics that would help the parents quickly identify what content was important to them. The overall visual layout, usage of graphics/photos, and navigation were streamlined to simplify the look even further.
THE RESULT
Voila! A clean, easy to navigate parent newsletter that was private.
The praise poured in. We did not expect this level of reaction from our parents over a newsletter. Who knew that this would be so well received and that parents would be so incredibly appreciative of these changes. Parents were now able to quickly find what they were looking for, and they were excited to receive it.
Admins loved the new workflow. We ran through it a couple of times, made a tweak or two and very quickly had a solid, replicable workflow that was easy to train others how to use, leveraged the features of the software and took the admins considerably less time to execute.
A WORD FROM OUR CLIENT
Dianne Willoughby
Editorial Manager, Communications
"To Amy, our Finalsite Consultant - There is no way we could have made this happen without you, Amy. You are creative, tactical, responsive, and patient. You deserve all the recognition and celebration of this milestone which will truly change our parents’ experience of their weekly newsletter. It’s been my absolute honor to partner with you on this."
A WORD FROM THE PARENTS
We're successful if our client is successful. Here what their parents had to say about the new parent newsletter.
A night to remember. Fresh cheesecake, figs, and pinot noir.
I really like the first Nueva Notes of the school year. It's clean and simple. I can pick the topic I am interested to read..very user-friendly.
I like the overall new look/organization of the newsletter. I especially like the ALL and UPPER buttons being clearly visible.
I thought it was much better--I like this format! It's a big improvement!
I just went through Nueva Notes and LOVE the new format. So much easier to read through and love how concise it is. ..Thank you "Nueva Communications team" for revamping the Nueva Notes.