Katherine Heights Townhomes

Z and I volunteered to create the monthly newsletter that gets delivered to all the residents of our community here in Katherine Heights. Our goal is to establish a publishing schedule, workflow, design template and ‘system’ in which most of the newsletter process could be automated. Since we’ve managed printed newsletters & digital E-Mail Marketing campaigns in the past we saw a clear opportunity to organize and implement a bit of organization. With a little structure & intent the whole process of creating, editing & publishing the newsletter should be much more efficient and error resistant through the automatic re-use of existing articles, schedules and so on.

This month we established the publishing schedule, basic workflow and setup & implemented the tools with which we (the front office, or whoever wishes to be responsible for it) will manage and maintain future publications.

We’ve been using podio to support many of our projects as well as our business workflow so it didn’t take much effort to setup a Podio Workspace for the Katherine Heights Newsletter.  Adding apps for Article management, built in version-monitoring for simple editing, discussions, reader input (both signed & anonymous), an events calendar and tied it all together with a publishing schedule to keep us on track.  With the workflow and information framework in place, starting in October we’ll be exporting data from Podio directly in to the newsletter template for printing.

If all goes well, by November we will have nearly completely automated the creation of every subsequent month’s newsletter.  A step up in quality, a step around unnecessary labor and errors, and a step in toward enhancing community involvement as we begin making the resources available for external input.  I’m excited – I love it when technology makes things easier rather then being a point of frustration. With a small amount of documentation created and stored in Podio I hope to see this more simple, efficient system stick around for a long time to come.

Here’s the front and back of September’s Newsletter.

[September-Front] [September-back]

Podio – Simple & Effective Workflow Resources