Shaping the Future of the Newsletter
I have been putting together a Huna related newsletter over a period of years and it has taken different forms over time. I am at a point where I am reviewing The Huna Adventurer’s Newsletter and considering some possible changes for format, delivery, coverage etc. I would really welcome your feedback at this point to assist me in its future development.
To this end I have put together a short simple survey and would be grateful if you could take the time to click through and provide your feedback. You may want to read the section below to read some of my thoughts on why I am considering changes first.
Survey Link
The survey link is here: https://www.questionpro.com/t/ASMBkZlkTM
First Some Considerations
Here are just some of my thoughts behind the review that you might be interested in. Presented in no particular order and without bias:
- Believe it or not, it can take quite a bit of time to put the Huna Adventurer’s Newsletter together. This comprises a mixture of things: writing unique content, sourcing additional content, images, sorting out metadata etc etc and repurposing it, formatting and technical fiddling (which always takes more time than I expect…) and promotion.
- In order to be worthwhile producing I would like to know it provides some form of value to readers at some level, however small and personal that might be. And of course that it gets read at all! Without that then I have to question if I should be doing it at all.
- I produce the Huna Adventurer’s Newsletter for free, it fueled by my self motivation to share the wonderful thing we refer to as Huna, propped up by my own time etc. It’s really a labour of love – Aloha -….but see the point above.
- Writing original content and shaping other pieces is personally useful for my own reflection and practice, although I would still be doing that in other ways if I was not writing the Huna Adventurer’s Newsletter.
- How frequent and how much content? Would it be preferable to change the frequency to more regular and have less content in each mail out? What content is of interest?
- I have tried to encourage contributions to the newsletter from readers, but apart from my regular contributors this has not really been taken up. Writing the newsletter can be quite a lonely business at times. Are there ways to encourage contributions of articles, topics on which to base content etc?
- A Huna newsletter, focussing on a specific lineage of Huna is in itself likely to have a fairly niche market. Are there ways to broaden readership?
- I have begun to get a regular trickle of feedback and questions in response to editions of each newsletter which I am taking as a good sign 🙂
- I might swap platform. I am currently using Mailchimp for delivering the newsletter which can be a bit fiddly at times so I am thinking of switching to Substack which in some ways has less functionality but is more focussed on spending time on generating content itself.
- What is this publication? What is any newsletter really? There are no hard and fast rules about what a newsletter is and this can range from a short few lines as a regular email to occasional monumental extended essays, it can range from 100% original content to 100% curated content from elsewhere.
- Would additional content types be valuable? This could include audio articles, exercises, meditations, a forum. It could even be a focus for a specific practice community with meet ups, short courses etc. There are a lot of possibilities, of course they would likely entail more input of time and resource.
- Would there be an appetite for providing more value and charging, for example providing some of the features above and making most or all of the content available for a small seedcorn subscription to support that? Say $5 a month. I could ramp things up considerably with a bit of extra resource and the newsletter could be much more than it is, but one subscriber does not a community make 🙂
Let Me Know What You Think
There’s some food for thought. This is all open, I have made no decisions hence wanting you get your views as dear readers. I won’t take offence to any feedback even if it is ‘don’t bother’ , ‘don’t change anything’ etc etc I would be grateful for your feedback.
The survey link is here: https://www.questionpro.com/t/ASMBkZlkTM
Of course, as always if you want to contribute get in touch, share any thoughts at any time please do here
Super Grateful 🙂
Pete
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