Case Study
Nueva School Parent Newsletter
Privacy issues force school to overload parent newsletter with too much information rendering it unreadable.
THE CHALLENGE
Up until this point, parents were provided with a weekly newsletter that contained ALL of the content being sent out that week. When I say “all” I mean everything. There was no shortened version of a story or post. There were no options to pick what you wanted to read based on a summary or title, no “read more” links. It was just scrolling and scrolling until you found what was important to you.
With a lower, middle and upper school all packed into one newsletter you can imagine how long it was. Many parents found it to be overwhelming and difficult to find what was important to them. The value of the newsletter was being lost. The reason there was so much packed into the newsletter was because of the need for privacy. A good portion of the information sent out in the newsletter was for parents of the school only.
A previous attempt to shorten and archive the newsletter on the website proved to be a loophole for exposing private content. That created fear. Fear of privacy breaches, lawsuits etc.
Getting the right help
We had been working with Amy Renaud for six months already. She was recommended to us during our recent website launch. We had a difficult deployment and found ourselves in a position where we did not know what to do next. We only had to read Amy’s LinkedIn profile to know she would be the perfect fit. So we put her on retainer right away and brought her in as our website consultant/web administrator to work with our team.
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.