What an electronic newsletter should look like

Electronic newsletter Insight outshines the competition

The winner of last year’s Ragan Recognition Award for Best Employee Newsletter was an electronic publication. That electronic newsletter, INsite, is the employee publication at Royal Bank of Canada, and its mission is to guide employees around RBC’s intranet.

“The point of having [the newsletter] online is to make our intranet more accessible and practical, and to bring the RBC community together,” INsite editor Jennifer Waddell told Showcase. RBC formerly published a quarterly print publication.

INsite appears in the e-mail boxes of RBC’s 70,000 global employees each month. The content of that e-mail is an image scrape of the intranet home page.

“Our stories changed from longer articles [in print] to short topic introductions,” Waddell said.

Below the headlines and blurbs are links to recommended reading for employees—other RBC Web sites, for instance. The bottom of the page features teasers for next month’s issue of INsite. Meanwhile, the right margin contains a pull-out box with links to articles from last month’s issue, along with an INsite ad that might, for example, ask for “roving reporters” for the newsletter.