Plan and Deliver Newsletters

Step 1

If you are an advisor to a student organization, coordinate any newsletter or other publication you may undertake through the campus Student Organization Center and through Kenton (Kent) Seaver, director of academic operations, within the Jindal School. If you are advising a Jindal School-based organization, please notify Kent, who track the efforts of Jindal School-based student groups.

For all other newsletters, notify and seek approval from your immediate supervisor, External Affairs Associate Dean Diane McNulty and the dean. They will help you meet school and University branding and content standards.

As you begin, be prepared to discuss the:

• Need for and purpose of your newsletter
• Content of your newsletter and how it will be generated
• Target audience (including overall size) you intend to reach and the mailing lists required
• Format of your newsletter — electronic, print, both?
• Frequency of publication — weekly, monthly, quarterly, other?
• Delivery method for your newsletter — email, snail mail, other?
• Expenses associated with your newsletter and how they will be paid.

Timetables

Please allow a minimum of four workweeks — 20 days — for designing, editing and electronically delivering your newsletter.

Please allow even more time:

• If you need help creating or gathering content, and/or
• If you plan to create a printed version of your newsletter and send it via regular mail.

The JSOM Web Services team requires one workweek — five-workdays — to design and lay out your newsletter.

The JSOM external affairs staff additionally requires a minimum of three workdays to edit the laid-out contents.

The UT Dallas Web Services team requires an additional minimum of five days to test electronic newsletters’ appearance on web browsers and smartphones.^*

^* — If you email your newsletter to 500 or fewer people, this testing is not required. However, be aware the JSOM Web Services team usually performs such tests.

The UT Dallas Web Services team may require more time, which may be used for additional editing, designing and internal testing.

Step 2

After your newsletter is approved, you will be asked to write and/or gather all the content, including stories, photos, graphics and other materials.

At this time, too, turn in any new mailing list/s or be prepared to discuss how you want to access and/or use existing mailing lists.

External Affairs Associate Dean Diane McNulty and her staff will review the content of your first issue in advance of it being designed and laid out to get an overview of the newsletter and some sense of its viewpoint and layout requirements.

After the first issue, you will turn in all content, stories, photos, logos and other elements, in templates to Jimmie Markham, communications manager.

Content should include a landing page — also known as the full-story page — as well as an email/HTML page. The email/HTML page is what readers first see when they open an email message containing a newsletter. Think of the email/HTML page as a table of contents. Links on that page will take readers to the landing/full-story page, where all the contents of a newsletter reside.

Jimmie or another external affairs editor will edit email-page and landing-page content and send edited copy back to you for review. After you accept, reject or otherwise work out proposed changes with Jimmie, you will return the revised copy to him.

He will then send a clean version of the revised copy to editors in the campus Office of Communications. One of them will edit the newsletter and return it to Jimmie. After accepting or rejecting edits proposed by the Office of Communications editor, Jimmie will create clean copies of the email page and the landing page and submit them and supporting photos, logos and other elements to Web Services in a Atlas ticket.

Step 3

Next, the Jindal School Web Services team formally designs and lays out the contents, using existing templates. The team also takes responsibility for uploading mailing lists to the appropriate list servers.

If you plan to snail-mail a printed newsletter, the external affairs staff will be happy to discuss printing and mail-house services with you.

Step 4

After the Web Services team completes design and layout, a “proof copy” is sent to Jimmie to review.  He works with Web Services to make any needed corrections before sending a corrected copy of the proof to an Office of Communications editor. That editor also reviews the proof and sends one last round of corrections to Jimmie. He, in turn, will again work with Web Services to make any more needed corrections.

Step 5

The Web Services team then sends the final proof to the University Office of Communications. The Web Services team in that office puts the newsletter through a review that is essentially the same as the process used for mass emails. At this stage, testing is focused on platforms, browsers and screen sizes: Does the newsletter show up properly on a variety of devices, including cellphones, PCs and Macs? Generally, the Office of Communications consults only the Jindal School Web Services team or the external affairs staff during this process.

Step 6

After the newsletter has been approved at the University level, the Jindal School’s Web Services team usually does a final check by sending out two or three internal tests of the newsletter to a small group of recipients that includes you, Dean McNulty, several members of the campus and school Web Services teams and an external affairs staff member. After the internal tests, the newsletter is sent to all recipients.

For more detailed information on Steps 5 and 6, please see the Jindal School Newsletters — Sending Process chapter in the Ask the Owl knowledge base.

Existing Jindal School Publications and Newsletters

JSOM creates and delivers two print publications for external, as well as internal audiences.

MANAGEMENT magazine, published twice yearly in spring and autumn, is a general-interest publication mailed to alumni, faculty, community and corporate supporters, staff and some students. The magazine includes news about students, faculty, alumni, corporate supporters, school programs, research, conferences and other events. Each issue is subsequently posted to the Jindal School website in an online format. PDFs of past issues dating to 2001 (the first issue was published in autumn 1997) are available on the JSOM website.

MANAGEMENT is produced by the Jindal School’s external affairs staff, which welcomes your news and input. Contact Diane McNulty, executive editor, and/or Jimmie Markham, managing editor.

The Jindal School’s existing newsletters include:

Finance Newsletter — Produced twice a year by the Finance and Managerial Economics Area and emailed to finance students, faculty, alumni and corporate supporters.

ITS Newsletter — Produced twice a year by the Information Systems Area and emailed to MIS students, alumni and professionals with ties to the school.

Jindal School Now — Produced twice a year by the external affairs staff, Jindal School Now is also known as the dean’s newsletter, because it is the chief means he uses to send news to other business school deans. The newsletter is also mailed to JSOM alumni, some corporate supporters, faculty and staff.

JSOM Career Management Center Upcoming Events — A weekly newsletter produced during the fall and spring semesters for JSOM students to keep them informed of events and opportunities that the Jindal School’s Career Management Center offers.