Revisiting this to share with someone and wanted to mention that I probably wouldn't use Mailer Lite to create a newsletter now. Instead, I would probably use Substack.
[These are some quickly written thoughts in response to this comment. I would welcome any tips or feedback and can expand the information provided if asked]
Newsletters are often an efficient way to disseminate new information about a project or community, e.g., new research, events or opportunities.
Newsletters can engage groups of people who are interested in a more mainstream topic (e.g., behaviour science) while subtly introducing them to EA.
Making a newsletter can be fun: I personally enjoy reading about new research and ideas in my areas of interest.
Being a knowledge broker is undervalued in the EA community.
I probably spent about 20-50 hours setting up the EA Behavioral Science Newsletter. With this guide, that would probably have been closer to 10 hours or maybe less.
A lot of my time setting this up was spent talking with people and coordinating. Those set up costs may not apply in other cases.
I have volunteers to help, so it is hard to estimate time commitments. Alone, I think I could probably produce a ‘good’ edition with 5-10 hours of work and a passable one in about 3-5 hours (all depends on what resources are accessible or shared).
Together, I’d estimate that the whole team probably puts in about 20 hours of work per quarterly edition.
I recommend MailerLite. Sam Salzar who is something of an expert at growing newsletters recommended it. It is free up to 1000 subscribers, you can add as many admins as you want, and it is very easy to set up and manage.
I suggest that you rework the structure of one or more of the existing newsletter templates. Here is what we use for the EA Behavioral Science Newsletter.
🏡 Join our community
📚 Summary
📖 Publications
📝 Preprints & articles
💬 Forum posts
🎧/🎦 Audio-visual
💰 Funding
💼 Jobs & volunteering
🗓 Events
👨🔬 Researcher profile
🏡 Join our community
Creators:
Previous editions:
The process for the EA Behavioral Science Newsletter is: (content) curation, (newsletter) creation, feedback, finishing and promotion. This starts about one month out from when each quarterly edition is due.
I think that starting with quarterly editions is a relatively low effort way to test if the newsletter has a good enough ROI to sustain. You can always increase the frequency in the future.
Here are some templates from the EA Behavioral Science Newsletter. I can share the forms with you if you want to create copies.
I also recommend that you make and share a rough plan for
Please let me know if you have any questions.
Hey! Thank you for your post! For those of you who are not afraid of coding a little bit, I suggest you to use Mautic (https://www.mautic.org/) and Amazon SES. It is way cheaper than subscribing a plan to MailerLite or Mailchimp for example if you have a lot of subscribers. Moreover, it allows you to create automations for introducing new subscribers to your organization , your thoughts or your research, without having to send mails manually.
Thanks for sharing Alex!