Margaret DeWitt looks to "management technology" to maximize the productivity of a small family firm.

"Notwithstanding 9/11 and the Blackout of 2003, New York City is still a vital, exciting place to work," commented Margaret DeWitt of Alexander Communications Group Inc.

"In our case, we also had a scaffolding collapse at our nowformer office building. It was a terrible accident, five people were killed. It went down with a horrible roar. You can imagine, post 9/11, how that affected people inside the building."

DeWitt's parents, Laurence and Shirley Alexander, founded the firm where she is now publisher. "Did I ever consider not going into newsletter publishing? I considered about everything but becoming a newsletter publisher.

"After college I went to work for Times-Mirror magazines and then Davis Publications. Davis published digest-type magazines, in mystery and sci-fi. I was in marketing but while we had some ad revenue, the overwhelming majority of income came from circulation and I was, inadvertently, learning newsletter circulation management.

"I joined Alexander about 15 years ago. Our firm began as a consulting firm that published a newsletter as a marketing tool, then evolved into a newsletter publishing operation which also did some consulting. About the time I joined is when we became a full-time newsletter business," she said.

"Today we publish 13 titles in a number of markets which we divide more or less evenly into half 'advisory' pubs and half 'technology' titles. It isn't the ideal way to do things, but clustering into two groups works for us.

"The advisory titles are largely edited in-house by journalists who learn the specialty reporting, and we market them both with traditional direct mail and, recently, most heavily with forced free trials.

"For the technical titles we use experts as contract editors. They're spread from Denver to Cambridge, U.K. We market them almost exclusively with small, tightly focused FFTs."

Online archive increases subscriber loyalty

"Each print subscription to those titles includes access to an online archive which goes back three to five years.

"With our software we can see which subscribers actually utilize the online access and which use it over and over. And, we learned, there is a direct correlation between use of the online resource and renewal rates.

"So, our challenge for this year was, If subs who access the databases renew better, how do we get more of them to do so? We hadn't thought of it as being a hard-sell, just to tell them that as added value for their subscription, they also have access to the online archives," she said.

Building on that higher renewal rate for online users, they have now instituted a three-step program to encourage use of the archives:

1. They've made their marketing materials more visual. They include screen shots and illustrations of computers.

2. Every issue of the print letter includes several references to materials available online with the link information.

3. Each new or renewing subscriber receives a phone call welcoming them, explaining the service, and registering them for the archive.

"With all this, we've now gotten the percentage of subs who use the online service up to 40 percent," DeWitt said. "It's a beginning."

Celebrating a half-century of publishing

This year is the 50th anniversary of the Alexanders' first title, Downtown Idea Exchange, tagged "Strategies and tactics for successful downtown revitalization."

"Ordinarily we believe that things like anniversaries definitely mean more to publishers than to readers," DeWitt allowed, "but fifty years just seemed worth marking.

"So, we've been celebrating all year. We attracted four leaders in the industry, including the chief executives of two competing associations to write a series of articles we're calling 'Perspectives.' We've sent a press release to industry pubs and websites with each one. At the end of the year we'll put them together as a booklet which we'll use as a premium.

"We reproduced Volume 1, Number 1 of Downtown Idea Exchange and posted it on our website. There are still a few oldtimers who remembered it and numerous newcomers who commented, 'Things really haven't changed that much over all the years, have they?'"

DeWitt continued, "Next year will be the 25th anniversary of Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Progress and we'll celebrate all over again. Internally, I think we thought this would be a title with a limited lifespan, that electric vehicle technology would become dominant and information about it would come from much larger sources than Alexander Communications. But, if it remains an 'emerging technology' for another 25 years, we won't complain.

"From now on, we'll be celebrating 'something' every year," she said.

Staffing

DeWitt said that NYC remains an excellent place for newsletter publishers. Interestingly, she echoes Peter Yessne a continent away in Los Altos, Calif. (NL/ NL 9/30/03), in commenting that the bursting of the dotcom bubble has added to the reservoir of talent available. Alexander also gets good results from using New York University students as part-timers.

"They are bright and motivated," DeWitt said, "and with a little training do well at things like telephone renewals." Their 25th Street offices are in the expanding NYU campus zone. She said there's a joke in Manhattan that NYU's inexorable creep northward will crash head-on someday soon in midtown with Columbia U. moving south.

"I'd be interested," DeWitt said, "in learning what other publishers are doing with technology--not just the internet, which everybody talks about, but management technology.

"We made a decision some years ago that we wanted to remain basically a small family firm. So, if we weren't going to expand staff, to prosper we had to become more productive. Operating pretty much in a vacuum, we've made several changes.

* "We made a conscious effort to ensure that everyone has the appropriate desktop productivity tools and the training to use them."

* "We have all our issues from 1995 to date on a database everyone can access. And they do, all the time, editors, marketers, everyone."

* "We customized our fulfillment system. We were able to make it much more user-friendly, which helped us put often-hidden information in everyone's hands. I can send an e-mail query asking things like, 'How many subscribers do we have who take more than one of this group's titles?' and get an e-mail answer quickly."

(Speaking of fufillment technology, DeWitt added, "By the way, for industry veterans, when we moved from our old offices, we found some of the old, inches-thick Compupower reports in the back of a closet.")

DeWitt noted one final virtue of a family firm. "Shirley still comes into the office every day. This is my first serious business downturn as the publisher. It's just invaluable to me to have her counsel just down the hall. 'What did you do in previous recessions, what worked, what didn't?' You can't replace that."

28 W. 25th St., 8th Fl., New York, NY 10010, 212-228-0246, fax [phone], www.alexcommgrp.com