By Chris Andersson, Communications and Campaigns Manager, FutureDotNow – July 2025
Raise your hand if you’re in a communications role and you started your career writing your organisation’s newsletter?
I suspect this is a lot of us. It’s certainly what I would task a junior comms colleague with now.
Except, at FutureDotNow, we’re a small (if very dynamic) team. So, alongside leading on brand, content, website, social, PR and external comms, I also write our regular newsletter. After almost 15 years in comms roles, I must have written hundreds (maybe thousands?) of newsletters, and by now, I can churn one out without much thought.
But that’s exactly the problem.
Without thought, it’s way too easy to stop interrogating what your newsletter is actually for, what it’s doing and what it’s offering your reader. It can easily become too focused on what you want to say and not on what your audience is getting out of it.
This was a big driving factor behind the relaunch of the monthly FutureDotNow newsletter. Edition 1 of ‘The Loop’ lands tomorrow.
It’s more than a new name and a fresh look (though we’ve got those too). It’s a shift in mindset.
We are moving from a ‘broadcast’ model of sharing updates and information to a ‘value’ model that delivers practical tips and insights designed to support our members and their work on digital skills. This might not sound revolutionary, but it’s an important step forward for us.
This newsletter refresh is the result of a lot of thinking from our Partnerships Manager Rich Burn and I over the last few weeks. We’ve asked ourselves which newsletters do we value? Which ones do we read? Which ones do we even open in the first place?
To be transparent, our goal isn’t *only* about providing a service, it’s also about growing and strengthening the FutureDotNow coalition. We hope The Loop will help us deliver:
- A stronger sense of community and coalition identity
- Content that’s practical, shareable, and emotionally resonant
- Clearer calls to action for better engagement
It’s very much a test-and-learn process and we’ll be iterating based on what lands well with our audiences, but I’m excited to see where The Loop takes us.
If you’re curious to see where we’re heading, you can sign up here.
