Put the Word out: Newsletters say much about you. (Office Technology).

Many nonprofits use a newsletter to communicate with their constituency. There are all kinds, from very fancy professionally produced glossy booklets that rival the best newsstand magazines, to photocopied pages typed on a typewriter complete with cross-outs and handwritten corrections.

There really isn't any "right" way to do a newsletter. Whatever serves to communicate effectively with the people you need to have know what's happening with your organization is good.

If it's been a while since you've looked at this aspect of your operation, it may be time to reconsider the way that you approach this function. While "homey" typed and handwritten pages can accomplish a feeling of simplicity, it can also bestow a feeling of unprofessionalism in the people that you most need in your corner.

Given the state of the tools available to you, both software and hardware, it really isn't difficult to create a good-looking newsletter. In fact, the most difficult part of the undertaking is retraining yourself from going overboard with fonts, text effects, and fancy formatting. Faced with the availability of 150 fonts, it's often hard to realize that most printed material uses only two or three fonts, one for headlines, a second for text, and possibly a third for emphasis.

There are some excellent books on desktop publishing, and a quick visit to your nearby library will pay big dividends in the long run.

Putting together a newsletter is pretty much a three-part process. The first of these is organizational. When you have the look and content settled, you'll need to lay out the newsletter. The last part of the process is printing the newsletter. Let's take a look at the organizational process, as well as touch on layout. Next month, it will be finishing up with layout, and discussing your options when it comes to actually generating the newsletter on paper.

There's no "I" in "team"

Creating and publishing a newsletter, regardless of how large or small it is, is not really a job for one person. While most organizations, especially the smaller ones, usually have one person who gets stuck with the job, the "publisher" of your entity's communications should be more of the team leader than a beast of burden.

There are a lot of facets to your organization, many of which your newsletter may want to share. No one person can really know or understand every nuance of every task that is performed.

In putting together a publishing "team," there are a number of things that need to be accomplished. For one thing, you need to find people to help with the creation of the material to be published. Then you need to find the subjects to cover in your newsletter.

The first step, however, is to put together a formal or informal "publishing committee." This will consist of people from throughout your organization who will help you focus in on the design and content of your newsletter. You don't need publishing professionals for this committee; anyone can (and does) come up with useful and helpful ideas. A good editor/publisher recognizes this, and treats every suggestion, even those that will never be used, as a valuable-and appreciated contribution.

It may seem a bit cynical, but calling for volunteers generally doesn't accomplish much, even in a volunteer organization. It's not that many of the people in your organization won't help if they are asked. It's usually that many people seem to feel that the jobs they accomplish are dull, boring, or uninteresting to others.

The answer to this is simply to ask. Ask for participation on your "publishing committee." Don't wait for volunteers. If you know someone with good interviewing skills, give them a tape recorder and ask them to go out and interview people in your organization who you may want to cover in the newsletter.

Don't restrict your coverage to the glamorous side of your organization. While cleaning the cages in a volunteer animal shelter may not be a glamorous job, it's certainly a necessary and valuable one. And the person who spends his or her time doing this mundane task is very worthy of their moment of thanks and glory.

Cut here, paste there

Deciding on a look for your newsletter and coming up with interesting, germane, and edited copy for it, are two of the most time-consuming tasks you'll have to contend with. Laying out a newsletter can be accomplished using a variety of tools.

If the design of your newsletter is fairly straightforward, you can probably just use a word processor, such as Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect. Both these (and others) will allow you to lay out text' in columns, use headlines and subheads, and insert photos and other graphics.

On the opposite side of the spectrum are specialized lay-out applications. Two of the best known of these are Adobe PageMaker and Quark XPress. These applications cost between $700 and $1,000, and have very, precise kerning capabilities (which adjusts the space between letters), and other tools that a professional graphics artist can use to gain complete control over the way a page looks when printed.

A good alternative for many users is the middle ground. When the desktop publishing craze first hit more than a decade ago, there were a score of applications available. As word processors such as Microsoft Word gamed more desktop publishing features, many of these mid-range desktop publishing applications bit the dust.

One of the applications that remained, and has gotten better with each iteration is Microsoft Publisher. The first version of Publisher was introduced in 1991. The latest version is Publisher 2002, which sells for about $130.

Publisher 2002 has a number of desirable features that make it a better choice for many users than a generic word processor. One of the most useful of these are Design Sets. These are templates, created by a design agency, that provide a unified look for various types of documents, including newsletters. And, 35 of these Design Sets are included.

Microsoft has also included 25 font schemes, which are collections of fonts that work well together. This saves you the trouble of trying to mix and match fonts by yours elf.

If you use Microsoft World, Publisher 2002 lets you keep whatever formatting, including embedded graphics and images, you have in your Word documents. There are Wizards that take you through the process of importing text from a variety of sources, and in many cases, you can keep, or discard the formatting of these documents when they are placed into a Publisher document. Publisher 2002 also has extensive support for outside printers. You can "package" your newsletter into a file that can be printed by most commercial printing houses. This includes support for industry standards such as Pantone colors and CYMK four-color process conversion. If these terms are unfamiliar to you, don't be concerned, you probably won't need to use these features.

The next column will be a more detailed look at the mechanics of performing a lay-out, as well as examining some of the options you have for producing output both in-house and externally.

Ted Needleman is the former associate publisher and editor-in-chief of Accounting Technology magazine. He is now a technology consultant and writer based in Stony Point, N.Y. His email address is [e-mail]