In the SCA, “electronic newsletters” generally take the form of infrequently-published PDFs that have a unique content and format and production infrastructure and distribution calendar, making them very different communications channels than branch websites and outwards-facing social media channels — but it doesn’t need to be like this.
One possible step along the path suggested in yesterday’s post would be for the web ministry to provide publishing solutions for electronic newsletters that could be used by the two hundred baronies which are required to produce them, as well as the smaller number of shires and cantons that produce them by choice.
(I exclude the kingdom newsletters as they have special requirements, although perhaps at some point in a paperless far future they could benefit from a similar type of publishing platform.)
Electronic Newsletters from a Web CMS
Many local branches use a content management system to publish their website, using various hosted services or open-source platforms such as WordPress.
Any interested web ministry could run some software that published selections from their baronies’ CMS in an electronic newsletter in compliance with the requirements of the Chronicler’s Policy — published on a regular basis (II.A.), in a static format that can be archived (II.B.1., III.C.3.B.), and distributed via email (II.D.) — and with the required inclusions of event announcements (II.K.2.), and a statement of ownership (III.C.1,).
(My reading of the Chronicler’s policy is is that the email could be delivered as HTML, but it’s also straightforward to convert from HTML to PDF and then email in that format, if some people really prefer that.)
The web ministries are well suited to operate this as a service for their participating baronies in the form of a server-side process that runs once a month to request some nicely formatted content from the website and send it to a mailing list — there are open source solutions and free WordPress plugins that can do this.
This could be implemented by individual web ministers for their local group, or in kingdoms where the kingdom web ministry manages CMS hosting centrally, they could include this in their services.
Benefits
This type of solution would let the web ministry focus on tools and platforms and tech ops, while the chroniclers focus on content — without siloing information.
For any baronial chronicler that wanted to opt in, they could produce their newsletter by just posting great content to the CMS, without having to worry about the mechanics of the electronic publishing infrastructure. (A tag or category could be used to specify which posts went just to the mailing list, or just to the public-facing website, or to both.)
This gets us a step towards a multi-channel world in which pieces of content — event announcements, pictures and news from recent events, messages from officers, meeting notes, officer lists, and so on — are mostly managed in one place, with multiple officers in the group all feeding material in to one system from which it flows out to multiple channels — including the branch website, discussion mailing list, newsletter mailing list, Facebook groups and events, Discord channels, Instagram feeds.
In baronies whose chronicler had lots of energy for content generation, the items they were producing would contribute fresh material for branch’s website. In other baronies, a chronicler with less energy for producing content could fill their newsletter by just picking and choosing material to include from the items that other officers had recently published to the website. And in little shires with an active web minister but no chronicler, the shire could offer email newsletters without appointing a separate officer for that role.
(Chroniclers who wanted to continue to use desktop publishing software to lay out PDFs every month would be welcome to do so, but I would expect that over the course of the next few years, as local office-holders came and went, a majority of baronies would opt in to this kind of system.)
Getting Started
This approach doesn’t appear to require a redefinition of any office’s areas of responsibility or any special approval from the Board: the web ministry already has the authority to host and manage various web services, and individual chroniclers/branches already have the authority to choose which publishing tools their newsletters will use.
A couple of branches have already been experimenting with CMS-to-newsletter pipelines; I am hoping that a couple more industrious web ministers (at the kingdom or baronial levels) will take the initiative to set more of these up and demonstrate that it can be done at a wider scale.
If your branch is taking steps in this direction, I’d love to hear from you!