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March 21: VtV RunMyVillage User Talk - 12 PM PT / 1 PM MT / 2 PM CT / 3 PM ET

Our March User Talk will be Part 2 of our very successful and very interactive February User Talk on How do Villages develop, create, edit, publish, distribute, and archive their Newsletters. 

Newsletters: they can be a very effective tool for promoting your Village and increasing engagement with your members and your broader community, but they can also be a significant burden to create and maintain, often requiring specialized skills and resources not readily available to most Villages. The challenge for Villages is how to create and publish effective, attractive, and compelling newsletters with a reasonable amount of effort.

Topics that we may discuss on March 21 include:

• Villages use the term “newsletter” to refer to many different types of documents with different objectives and different audiences. We may want to discuss how Villages decide on their newsletters’ objectives and audiences.  
• Newsletter content (we included a list in the thread on our Forum).  How to decide what is the best content for different objectives and different audiences?
• Villages use many different design platforms (e.g., MS Publisher, InDesign, RMV’s Custom Page Editor, Adobe Acrobat, Canva, MailChimp). We may want to discuss more about these.
• What are best practices including tips “to make it easy” to develop content, lay out the newsletter, and distribute it.
• What are tradeoffs and choices about choosing editors and writers, using volunteers rather than staff, soliciting content from Village members, etc.

This will again be a discussion among the attendees, so please come prepared to share your experiences, successes, along with your challenges and how you have resolved them. We expect that the attendees will learn best practices and new ideas that they can apply to their Village’s efforts.

You don’t have to have been at the February User Talk to benefit from this one.  Not required, but you may want to listen to the February User Talk: https://youtu.be/rzTVMy9oP7Q .  Also, see postings on our Forum for the February User Talk for a recap of some of the key points from February, some links to Village newsletters that we think are illustrative, and a list of content types that we’ve collected from the Village newsletters that we’ve looked at.

Please invite anyone from your Village who you think might be interested in this topic. You can register on the calendar on the Village to Village Network website. https://www.vtvnetwork.org/content.aspx?page_id=4002&club_id=691012&item_id=1853812&event_date_id=255