I have approximately forty-seven newsletter subscriptions. I know this because I finally went through my email last month and did a proper accounting. Some of them I’ve read faithfully for years. A few I opened once and forgot to unsubscribe. Several exist in a liminal state where I’m vaguely curious but never actually read them, yet feel some ambient attachment to — like a gym membership for my brain.
The irony isn’t lost on me. In my professional life, I’ve been advocating for email newsletters since roughly 2015, when everyone in digital was telling organizations to put everything on Facebook and trust the algorithm. I was the person in the room saying: own your list, don’t rent your audience. That argument seemed contrarian at the time. Now it looks obvious. Now everyone has a newsletter.
Which creates a new problem: the newsletter as default, rather than the newsletter as choice.
I’ve been reviewing email programs for a couple of friends’ accounts recently, and the pattern is familiar. An organization launches a newsletter because it seems like a thing they should have. They write it like a press release. They send it monthly — or whenever they remember to — with a subject line that says something like “June Update from [Organization Name].” Open rates are mediocre. Click-throughs are grim. Leadership is vaguely disappointed but not sure why.
Here’s what separates the newsletters people actually read from the ones that quietly accumulate in a folder marked “reference”: a distinct point of view, a consistent cadence, and genuine respect for the reader’s time. That’s it. Three things, none of which require a big budget or a platform migration.
Point of view doesn’t mean being provocative for its own sake. It means having an editorial stance — something you care about, something that shapes what you include and what you leave out. Consistent cadence means being there when you said you’d be there, even if it’s only once a month. And respecting your reader’s time means getting to the point, curating rather than aggregating, and trusting that a tight 400-word email is worth more than an exhaustive 2,000-word one that no one finishes.
The organizations I’ve seen do this well — some of them fairly small, resource-constrained nonprofits — have built genuine communities around their newsletters. Readers respond. Donors cite them. Staff actually write them with some pride.
The organizations doing it poorly are mostly just adding to the noise. And there’s already plenty of that.
I’m going to go unsubscribe from about twenty things now. Then I’ll probably resubscribe to half of them by Thursday.