Behind the scenes of the Two Towers club newsletter
Archive — original publication: 20/05/2024 alle 11:17.
By Alessandro Tampieri, VPPR, Two Towers Bologna.
A thought attributed to Fred Rogers — that hearing someone’s story helps us understand and love them — stayed with me and influenced later choices.
At the beginning of my second term as VPPR of Toastmasters Two Towers in Bologna, I proposed a club newsletter at our first Executive Committee meeting. Everyone liked the idea; agreeing on how to produce it generated a livelier debate. As often happens in teams, we needed to reconcile different views, choose a direction and begin.
Designing the newsletter: our guidelines
We set a few guidelines for a 12-month pilot during 2023–2024:
- A monthly newsletter, published on the Friday before the first meeting of each month.
- Three contributions: two longer pieces, a shorter or lighter item, followed by the monthly calendar.
- Contributions averaging 1,500–2,500 characters — a written equivalent of the discipline encouraged by the meeting Timer.
- A conversational style, mainly in Italian but also open to English, our club’s second official language.
- No fixed editorial team: a different working group each month, giving as many members as possible a chance to practise communication and shared leadership.
This is the core of the Two Towers newsletter: a space to tell our own stories and the club’s story through members’ personal experiences, while looking outward to the Area, Division, District and beyond.
It creates a bridge through time — the club marked ten years in Bologna that spring — and across the wider Toastmasters network.
The challenge of keeping content fresh
There are still challenges ahead: finding engaging content that sustains monthly publication and keeps readers curious. A few people asked to leave the mailing list, but many others subscribed, shared additional addresses or offered positive feedback.
We cannot please everyone, and even an appreciative audience can lose interest if we do not keep content fresh. Moving to a more capable platform could improve editing, add audio, video and photo galleries, and strengthen interaction with our social channels. Helping all our media reinforce one another may be one of a VPPR’s hardest goals.
Those decisions belong to the next Executive Committee. My advice to anyone considering a newsletter is to try it, with clear guidelines and an editorial plan covering at least the medium term.
I hope our club continues to combine experienced members’ knowledge with the fresh ideas and perspectives of newer members — the lifeblood of a club’s story. Once we hear people’s stories, it becomes much easier to connect with them.
