How Community Care Created and Evolved a Newsletter Course

By Esther Kezia Thorpe, freelance media analyst and co-founder at Media Voices

As publishers lean into newsletters as a more reliable way of building relationships with audiences, newsletter courses are being explored as a method of user acquisition and engagement.

At the Publisher Newsletter Summit in London, B2B publication Community Care’s Head of Content Ruth Hardy-Mullings gave a talk about their journey with newsletter courses, from identifying the problem a newsletter course would solve, to testing and learning with frequency, delivery and content.

The starting point

Community Care is a publication run by the Mark Allen Group aimed at social workers, occupational therapists and other practitioners working in social care. Their subscription learning resources, Community Care Inform (children and adults), are websites where the information and learning tools live.

The public sector audience Community Care serves are incredibly time-poor and struggle with high workloads and vacancy rates on their teams. As part of regular work to understand their audience, Hardy-Mullings explained that their users want to spend more time doing the essential learning needed as part of their jobs, but feel they lack the time to do so.

Generally, the audience gave plenty of positive feedback about the content on Inform. A consistent problem was finding time to log on, remembering details and proactively seeking out learning.

An additional challenge is that local authorities, NHS trusts and other educational institutions like universities often buy subscriptions for staff and students. This adds pressure to prove to senior leaders and key decision makers that they are getting value for money.

“So our challenge is really how do we support our users to learn in the very small amount of time that they do have?,” said Hardy-Mullings.

Enter newsletter courses

A few high-profile publishers experimenting with time-limited newsletters around specific topics inspired Hardy-Mullings. She noted in particular the Pew Research Center’s 5-lesson course on US immigration, and more recently The Guardian’s Reclaim your Brain newsletter course about reducing screen time. In March, it was reported that nearly 140,000 people signed up to receive the 5-week newsletter.

“It felt like [a newsletter course] was a good fit for our audience, because they’re often in their email inboxes,” Hardy-Mullings said, explaining why it suited Community Care’s audience. “That’s where they like to get information, and one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Inform is our weekly newsletter.”

“It also felt a good fit for us as a publisher, because they require a certain amount of time investment to create, but then they’re evergreen – as automated products they can run and run without more time investment from you.”

In addition, a newsletter course would be a more tempting prospect to sign up for than an ongoing newsletter. Participants sign up for a finite period of time, which feels more manageable when inboxes are under pressure.

The first experiment

In March 2021, Community Care Inform launched its first few courses: one on domestic abuse and one on trauma-informed practice. They settled on six emails sent over a three-week period, plus a welcome and congratulations email.

The content was taken from longer guides on the Inform website and broken down into ten to 15 minute chunks, hosted in the body of the email itself. This solved the problem of having to remember logins to the Inform website, as Hardy-Mullings explained:

“Someone was able to just open up their email, read the content, and get that learning wherever they are; in a car, sitting before they go into a home visit, or on the commute home. It’s making use of those small amounts of time that people do have.”

Each email had a recap section at the beginning and a progress bar to keep readers motivated and visualize how far through the course they were. There was also a ‘reflective exercise’ task at the end that the recipient could do alone or with a colleague in team meetings to provide evidence for Continuing Professional Development (Continuing Education). The purpose of the course wasn’t to drive clicks to the website, but further reading links were included.

“Since 2021, we’ve sent 25,000 emails,” shared Hardy-Mullings. “They’re still running, and they’re evergreen, so you can just go and sign up for them. Across all of our emails, we’ve had a 34% open rate and a 44% click-to-open rate, which compares favorably with other emails that we publish, and also with the general stats for media and publishing emails.”

“That click rate was particularly encouraging as the content was just within the email itself, but people were still going and clicking through to inform and using the learning we had on the site as well.”

The general feedback was that people loved the convenience of the course and the bite-sized format of learning. “They found it a good way to learn that could genuinely fit into their working week,” said Hardy-Mullings.

But not everyone was happy. “Senior leaders and key decision makers we work with weren’t as convinced by it, because it wasn’t translating into engagement stats on the Inform website,” Hardy-Mullings explained. “As users themselves, they couldn’t see which members of their staff had signed up and completed the course. So that was something that we wanted to address with future iterations.”

Take two

Although the first two newsletter courses continued to run, the team went back to the drawing board for their next courses. In 2022, Habit of Learning was launched, based on research about how to build a daily habit and integrate learning into everyday life.

“We went more intensive. We went to a daily email format, so one email every day for the working week, and that was a four-week course,” said Hardy-Mullings. “The intention behind it was that by the time someone had done a course, they would really have embedded that practice of daily learning into their routine.”

Each email aimed to deliver five to 10 minutes of learning each day, but rather than having the content within the emails themselves this time, they experimented with linking the user straight to Inform, to help establish the habit of logging in. This course was designed in partnership with local authority partners to cover a range of key topics in social work, and these partners then signed staff up in cohorts as part of a group learning model.

43,000 emails have been sent between 2022 and 2024. But Hardy-Mullings said that the open rate dropped to 14%, even though the click-to-open rate was much higher at 73%.

Feedback from participants showed that although some enjoyed daily learning, it was a struggle to keep up with five days a week, especially for part-time workers. “They’d start with good intentions – I’m sure we all do – but by the end of week one, or week two, they’d be behind on emails, even get a bit demoralized, and wouldn’t continue opening them,” she explained. “Once people have got out of that habit of opening emails, it’s very hard to get them back into it.”

Senior leaders were happier, as they liked being able to sign up cohorts of staff and incorporate it into their learning, as well as track what had been completed through Inform.

Third time’s the charm

Earlier this year, the team brought together the positives and negatives from these previous experiments into Habit of Learning 2.0. Rather than a daily email, the latest iteration is delivered three times a week over a three-week period, resulting in 9 emails total.

The content is specifically created to ensure it is genuinely bite-sized and has moved back to a topic-based model to give users a fundamental grounding in each area. Users can do self-directed learning by signing up themselves, or local authorities can sign staff up in cohorts.

Habit of Learning 2.0 is still early on, but so far the response has been positive, with open rates back up to 33% and click-to-open rates high at 68%. More encouraging is that in a survey, two-thirds of users said they were either ‘satisfied’ or ‘very satisfied’ with the course, with no one recording they were dissatisfied.

Key learnings from Community Care Inform’s newsletter course experiments

Hardy-Mullings said the publisher’s main learning from the last few years is that it’s vital not to overwhelm your audience. “Unless you have a very engaged audience or you’re covering something that needs a daily format, I think daily emails are too much,” she said. “Two to three emails a week is our sweet spot; one a week is actually too few.”

“But I also think it’s vital to experiment with what works for your audience. We’re quite a niche B2B brand with quite specific challenges, so what works for your publication might be very different to ours.”

The Community Care team are planning to continue experimenting and iterating, bringing out topics in modular systems to suit their audience needs. Newsletters will continue to be a core delivery mechanism. “It’s where audiences are spending a lot of time, and it builds direct relationships with them so you’re not reliant on social media platforms,” concluded Hardy-Mullings. “Find your audience where they are, not where you want them to be.”