Mens Club Email Newsletters

The overall goal was to maintain outreach to Men's Club members by increasing the frequency and content of the email newsletters to a weekly basis. Even though the amount of programming by our Mens Club was down, and in-person contact was minimal due to the pandemic, we felt that we could at least send out weekly emails with happenings in the synagogue and community to let members know we are still here and care. Prior to this, the email newsletters were sent out on an adhoc basis primarily to publicize upcoming events. However, with the Covid shutdown, events were few and far between, and even sparse a year after the pandemic started. So we embarked on a campaign to provide weekly email newsletters.

To fill content in the lack of programming by our Men’s Club, we would promote the online webinars provided by FJMC International and our Midwest Region. We asked members to share news of events they were aware of. We included links to podcasts and other online resources.

Because of restrictions on attendance at services, attendance was sparse at simchas so we included notes congratulating families of recent b’nai mitzvot kids. We feel this adds a nice personal touch to the “younger” men in our community who have school age children. When mid-week in-person minyan returned, we included reminders for members to attend to ensure we had a full minyan. We often highlight certain synagogue events in our newsletter even though not sponsored by Men's Club. And the synagogue includes Mens Club events in the synagogue-wide weekly emails. So by having our emails on the same weekly frequency, we each reinforce the publicity of community events, whcih may otherwise be drowned out by other emails.

The email newsletters are created by our VP of communications. He generates and finds most of the content, and also solicits weekly input from members. Some of the content is taken from our synagogue emails and lists upcoming synagogue events, which are not sponsored by the Mens Club. Some of the content is taken from the FJMC emails about online webinars and other events.

The email newsletters use a standard template, so that it is easy to cut & paste content to fill it in. The newsletter is prepared usually on Thursday evenings by our VP of Communications. It is scheduled to be automatically delivered via email at 6 AM each Sunday morning. In the past, the email was sent out often on an ad hoc basis when there were events to promote. Now members know they can dependably expect to find our email newsletter in their in-box each Sunday morning.

We use Constant Contact as our email database service provider. The Constant Contact database includes active members, inactive members, friends, prospects and new members of the synagogue. So it is delivered to a wider base than just the active members. We hope including inactive members and prospects will encourage reactivation or joining. When Men’s Club hosts events, we have a sign-up sheet and input new names and emails into Constant Contact. Over time the list has increased to more than 500 names, which is more than triple the number of active, paid-up members. Constant Contact provides statistics on the reading of the emails. It reports that after 48 hours, there is usually around 50% read rate of the emails, which is considerably high given the high proportion of recipients who are inactive members. The term inactive really means they are unpaid members. We have a large cadre of inactive members who come to our major events, such as our annual Steak & Scotch dinner. So we know we are reaching many of them, and keeping them linked to the club via the emails.

Six sample emails are provided.