Note: I originally wrote this post for Mailout Interactive.

I used to work for a national charity.  Each month, I would create an email newsletter.  My objective was clear: “I need to inform them!” So I would compile a series of articles on what we’d done in the past month, and what we were about to do.  I would also have articles on events, donation opportunities, and photo features.  But the one question I wasn’t asking was: who will be reading this?

“Who is my audience?” is the first question you should ask when you sit down to write a newsletter.  The goal is to define groups of people as specifically as you can, so that you can send them the content they are the most likely to read.

Here’s how it worked while I was working at the charity.  Generally, we had two groups: donors and stakeholders.  I soon learned that these groups differed in the way they processed email. Over the years, I created profiles for my readers with the idea of serving them the right type of content.  Here’s an example of how this worked for donors and stakeholders:

For donors

Most of our donors were A-type personalities: they were always on the move, moving from meeting to meeting, and generally consuming email on-the-go.  I started calling different donors on my list to ask them what kind of information they wanted to receive.  After interpreting those conversations, I came up with two types of email they wanted to receive:

• Yearly: a longer update on where their money was going. This email would say “Yearly report” right in the subject line.  It was formal and contained an introduction, a financial chart, success stories, and a conclusion.
• More frequently: quick “actionable” requests. These people were problem solvers: they wanted just one article, that quickly and clearly defined a problem for them to solve.  This could mean an urgent financial need, or an important event that we wanted them to attend.  Because it was likely that they would be reading on their Blackberries, the subject line and the first line of content were very important for this type of email.

For stakeholders

These were the people in the community who identified strongly with our work and our narrative. This group was definitely more relaxed when it came to email: they would read email leisurely.  For them, I decided to send:

• A regular monthly newsletter: this was a traditional newsletter, with 3-5 articles.  Whenever I could, I included a photo with each article that came from our charity work (no clipart allowed!).  Each issue also included at least one story.  These recipients loved hearing real-life stories and examples; these types of articles were always my “most viewed.”

If you don’t know you’re audience, it will be hard to know what to say.  Building a profile for the different groups within your subscription list is a great first step to understanding what to send your audience.