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New Year, New Change Order Member Newsletter Format

By CSI Chicago Chapter posted 12-16-2020 04:16 PM

  

New Year, New Change Order Member Newsletter Format
Written by: Brad Schwab, CSI CDT | CSI Chicago Chapter President

Happy New Year!  CSI Chicago is looking forward to another successful year of advancing the greater Chicago area design and construction community’s knowledge of building information management, construction technology, and project delivery methods to improve facility performance while fostering relationships and promoting education.

 

2020 was an unprecedented year that required the Chapter to pivot quickly and increase our utilization of digital technology in all of our initiatives. 2020 pushed every committee to assess their offerings, simplify, and innovate. 

 

The Communications Committee assessed the chapter’s current communications and identified the monthly Change Order member eNewsletter as the first initiative to simplify and innovate. The committee determined in order to innovate digitally through improving the website, our email communications, and social media communications, they needed to free up resources by simplifying and improving the delivery of the Change Order eNewsletter. The Change Order eNewsletter was the most labor-intensive communication the committee produced and they discovered through digital analytics that it was being read by around 15% of the membership monthly.

 

The committee was confident they wanted to continue to deliver the Change Order content, but they needed to come up with a more efficient way to do it while increasing member readership.  They quickly identified the reason it took so much labor was because we were designing the Change Order eNewsletter as a print magazine and instead of printing it we were delivering it as a PDF. They also identified the content that was being put in the Change Order eNewsletter was all on the website and they were relaying it out in the Change Order magazine format in InDesign, saving it as a PDF, and then delivering it in an email where members had to click to open the PDF to see what was inside.

 

Their solution to save labor and increase readership of the Change Order was to utilize the existing content on the website and deliver the Change Order eNewsletter content in an email with small easily digestible sections.  This new format will allow members to scroll through quickly and see the content headlines and then click on the information they are interested in learning more about.  

 

The committee and I are hopeful that this new format will be more useful and efficient for members while allowing the committee to focus efforts on new innovative ideas to help drive membership and partnership.

If you have any questions or comments, please contact us info@csichicago.org.

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