John Writes

The advantages of email newsletters are many:

Up to date information

It takes much less time to produce an email newsletter than to work with a printer and post out a written newsletter. Instead of receiving just 3 written newsletters a year, we propose to begin by sending you either a written or email newsletter every 2 months. This doubles the amount of communication we have with our supporters & team members and makes sure that it’s all much more current. A frustration with written newsletters is that sometimes we have to send them just before we finish a mission, which means you don’t hear about it for months! The prayer diary also misses many events that are booked in after production, which leads me to the next point …

Prayermail

If you like the format of this e-newsletter, then why not sign up for our weekly prayer email click here . This gives you the most up to date news on events & people. At present 334 people receive it. We’d love to see this expand hugely so that all of our supporters who have email can have all the prayer information that they need to support this work of evangelism.  This links to …

Interactive. 

The email enables you to make immediate links to the website (see next point) and from there to contact any of the TFM staff. You can sign up for the prayer email, register interest in a mission, find out about an event happening near you, book in for training or for the SCE course, give other feedback, etc. The new website looks great – take a look round while you are here.  Our aim is to keep it ticking over with news and make it a great place to interact / get involved.

Links to articles

An e-newsletter is structured to give you some headlines with links to longer articles. Obviously we think all the articles are worth reading! If you are particularly grabbed by one theme, however, you can immediately click on that. The website also has loads of other stuff and will soon have updated downloadable resources, so check these out while you are online.

Cost

You might not realise it but to send a printed mailing to 5000 people costs about £5000-6000 each time. That’s a lot of money in a year at a time when money is tight. An e-newsletter essentially costs nothing apart from staff time. We can produce it in-house and if we increased our distribution to 20,000 people there would be no additional cost. This reminds me …

Spreading the Word

If you receive a written newsletter you probably keep it rather than passing it on. With an e-newsletter, you can always forward it to others in your church who might be interested. I don’t suggest you do this indiscriminately; otherwise it will be like spam! So, a huge plus of an e-newsletter is that it can be passed on by each recipient to others, creating a bigger readership. If those people decide they want to receive it directly, it is simple to request e-newsletter via the website link.

 

Overall we think this is an exciting new initiative to help us keep you informed and further the work of TFM in spreading the Gospel.  Please lets us know what you think and let us have any suggestions you may have for future enewsletter content.