ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) is the global body for professional accountants and has been serving the profession for more than 100 years. Using Newsweaver’s email newsletter technology instead of its own internal content management system (CMS), it was able to cut newsletter production times in half and improve the quality of its internal communications.

Challenge

Suzanne Masters, ACCA’s Internal Communications Manager and editor of internal newsletter ACCA Life, needed to find a solution that addressed a number of limitations experienced with the internal CMS. She wanted to reduce production time, have the ability to use photographs, brand the newsletter to make it look more professional and be able to more effectively measure employee readership and article popularity.

Solution

Suzanne chose Newsweaver as it gave her the ability to achieve her goals. It also allowed her to seamlessly shift her email communications from their internal CMS. The first step was to design a newsletter template that offered easy and clear navigation for the reader, as well as giving maximum exposure to all the content, including images. She also wanted to include all the content in the newsletter, rather than linking back to the intranet, thereby allowing staff based in countries with limited intranet connection to read the entire articles. Newsweaver’s unique microsite technology gave her this flexibility by automatically generating article back pages as they are needed. Her account also contains reporting on each mailing so she can see performance metrics such as delivery, opens and article clicks.

Results

Suzanne says: “By using Newsweaver, we were able to cut preparation and sign-off times by around 50%.”

Now that Suzanne and her team have in-depth subscriber reporting for each publication, she says they can monitor “readership across the offices and regions, as well as track article popularity. We’ve been using this to inform editorial decisions and, with the new template design, we can easily make changes to content and sections.”

She adds: “Feedback for our new look and the way we present all the content within the newsletter has been extremely positive. Now that we can use images, we can invite readers to send in photos for the newsletter. This new feature has proven to be one of the top-rated sections.”