Case Study: Communicating with subscribers to the CLG’s Home Information Pack newsletter (PROGRESS)

Communities and Local Government is the department of state primarily responsible for housing-related issues. One of its key housing policy objectives is to make it easier for people buying and selling homes, a process that CLG believes has been slow, wasteful, stressful and causes far too much delay and failure. Home Information Packs were introduced throughout England and Wales during 2007 to help to remedy this.

A key communications objective was to ensure that solicitors, estate agents, mortgage lenders and other property professionals were kept informed, and both to seek and to provide feedback from/to interested parties. In the summer of 2005, ABC was asked to make ready a mailing database, based initially on lists that existed within CLG. An initial e-mail broadcast to these stakeholders was undertaken, preceded by a postal mailshot to gather e-mail addresses where these were unavailable. In both cases, recipients were invited to opt-in using a dedicated web form, which also asked them whether they were willing to participate in industry-wide discussions regarding Home Information Packs. Both mailshots stressed the inclusive nature of the communications process, and that colleagues were welcome to subscribe in their own right, while the web form also asked them to indicate if any changes to their details were necessary, as well as giving them the opportunity to opt-out ie. to be removed from the mailing database.

While responses (and new subscriptions) were coming in via the web form, and being validated and added to the database, ABC was collaborating with CLG regarding the design and layout of the newsletter. An overall grid was agreed, then colours, fonts, links and other design issues were finalised. Once these were signed off, we began to receive the content for the first issue, which was able to be distributed very quickly, once CLG had given the go-ahead. One key feature of electronic newsletters is worth reiterating here, which is that the time and cost involved in mailing them is entirely insensitive to volume, unlike printed materials, and another is that the time and cost needed to generate the ‘artwork’ is a fraction of what would be needed for a printed publication, which enables the content to be more timely.

Because the level of sophistication of people’s IT systems varies widely, the newsletter is distributed both as HTML and as a plain text alert, and the database has a ‘flag’ that denotes which the recipient wishes to receive. In each case however, the information sources quoted in the newsletter take the form of URLs ie. Internet website addresses, or downloadable document locations, both for CLG itself and other professional organisations, such as the Surveyor & Valuers Association and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors. In the case of the HTML version of the newsletter, these addresses are obviously clickable hyperlinks. To see a specimen PROGRESS newsletter, click here. A later innovation was the use of ‘variable content’ whereby in a section of a newsletter certain categories of data subject would see one set of text/links, others something different — or no text at all.

In parallel with the newsletter, ABC maintains a web portal for all aspects of the newsletter: links for new and existing subscribers, to back issues and to a PDF version of the newsletter, etc. To see this, click here.

Commenting on the ease with which information about the Home Information Pack is being disseminated, Michael Simpson, CLG’s Publicity Manager, said: “Once the database was ready and we had signed off the design and layout, it has proved remarkably simple to distribute each newsletter. We just supply the text and the links, and ABC does the rest. After we are ready to release each newsletter, it can be in people’s in-boxes within the hour!”

There are a number of important client and subscriber benefits:

• information is presented in a user-friendly and professional manner, with clickable links to a wide range of publications, reports, legislation and third-party websites
• the ease with which the e-mail newsletter can be circulated between colleagues, together with the ability to refer interested parties to a webform via publicity or advertising, and the simplicity of new subscribers signing up via the web, enables the subscriber base to grow, with little impact on time or budget
• since distribution involves merely uploading the newsletter to the web and ‘merging’ this with the web-based database, its content can be timely and topical, and feedback on key issues can be canvassed rapidly

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