Above: I presented this poster, which I also designed, about our newsletter strategy and results at the Association of American Medical Colleges’ Joint Conference, representing the Group on Faculty Affairs, in 2026.
The Problem
Small engagement
The IU School of Medicine Faculty Affairs and Professional Development (FAPD) faculty newsletter was sent to more than 7,500 faculty members at the end of 2024. But despite the large audience, it had minimal engagement.
Difficulty communicating through other methods
Simply put, we need the newsletter to work.
We face several roadblocks when communicating with faculty:
- Tech challenges. Many of our faculty were (and still are) dually employed — meaning they work for both IU School of Medicine and IU Health. Because of strong yet conflicting internet security features for both the health system and medical school, faculty who are frequently located on an IU Health campus cannot easily access the medical school’s intranet.
- Limited website exposure. The IU School of Medicine Strategic Communications teams prefers the public-facing website to be used for marketing to external audiences, rather than internal ones. We are limited in what is deemed appropriate content for the easily accessible (compared with the intranet) website.
- Social media reaches wrong audiences. Because most of our work is for internal audiences, external social media exposure is not particularly helpful. Also, in order to have a page on LinkedIn (the most fitting channel, if we were to use one), the university requires us to post three times a week. But with a 1.2-FTE communication team, managing an active social media channel on top of other tasks is not feasible.
- Dispersed workforce. Many part-time, adjunct and affiliate faculty never step foot into an IU School of Medicine facility, meaning they do not see digital signage or fliers, and cannot easily pick up printed materials. They work in nine campuses, plus countless medical offices, across the state. Some only precept one or two residents or host a few medical students in clerkships per year. The rest of their work is not for IU School of Medicine, but for private practices or care in other hospitals.
- No access to direct mail. The university prohibits individual schools or departments from sending physical mail to anyone’s home address, outside of fundraising and admissions departments. Most clinicians, in particular, do not work regularly in offices and don’t receive mail in personal mailboxes at work.
- Texting is not an option. We have chosen not to add text messaging to our communications, since our clinical staff, in particular, are frequently receiving urgent text messages related to clinical care. Those need to be their priority.
The newsletter is our best tool — one that most of our faculty can access and count on for important information that can improve their careers.
We need to break through a lot of noise.
IU faculty and staff sent nearly 200 million emails in 2024 (and presumably more since then). We received more than 727 million and blocked more than 959 million in the same year.
It’s clear that faculty inboxes are cluttered with information. In fact, it’s not unusual to get dozens of emails from IU departments in a single week.
We need our newsletter to break through noisy inboxes and be seen, opened, read and acted upon.
A small piece of an issue of the old Faculty Affairs and Professional Development newsletter, pre-strategy reset in late July 2025.
The Strategy
Clarify our goals.
We needed to create a communications tool that:
- Drove faculty to act: register for faculty development events, avoid issues like mistreatment, and understand and implement policy changes
- Broke through noisy inboxes of busy faculty
- Was a short read
- Served as a single source of truth — so faculty knew they could keep up to date with information they needed to know without having to seek content in multiple places (newsletter, website, intranet, digital signage, social media, word-of-mouth, managers, etc.).
Gather the data.
I knew from the moment I arrived in this School of Medicine role at the end of 2023 that the newsletter needed work. But I didn’t want to just build something different. I wanted to make sure I understood the problems and had data to prove it.
For a full year:
- I watched our metrics.
- I presented data to our leadership team, so they understood the problem before I implemented a new strategy, and so they could share the institutional knowledge they knew deeply and personally.
- I collaborated with our assistant, associate, senior associate and executive associate deans; our faculty affairs, professional development, and research and evaluation directors; and various individuals across the School of Medicine, seeking information about our faculty, the problems they faced and the challenges their working environments presented.
- I spent time getting to know the unique nuances of academic medicine, of clinical and research faculty, and of the policies and national issues that affected them.
- I learned everything I could about our department, how we solve problems faculty on a regular basis, and what our perceived and actual benefits are.
Then I started strategizing.
Identify the problems.
Once I had data to support what I knew to be true — especially that more than half of our full-time faculty were not opening our newsletter (and significantly fewer adjunct and affiliate faculty were), and that readers weren’t clicking on anything beyond story #2 — and I had a better grasp of the problems our faculty were facing, I felt confident putting together a strategy that combatted common issues while providing our audiences what they needed to know in a format they would read.
Build the strategy.
I identified the pillars of a new strategy I believed would work, and I presented it to our leadership team for feedback and input. It was well received, and fully supported by our leaders.
The strategy was centered around putting our readers first:
- Respecting their time
- Providing relevant content without overwhelming them with too much information
- Using thoughtful design to lead busy readers through the newsletter
The Results
A newsletter that breaks through the noise
Our new, shorter newsletter, called Five Things to Know This Week (see an example issue at right), has seen a leap in open rates and engagement, measured in terms of the number of registrations for professional development events on newsletter-release dates.
The difference was almost immediately visible; the data shown here compare the first five months of the new newsletter (July 28 to Dec. 31, 2025) with the same five months in the prior year.
With an increased mean open rate of 31.8%, as well as a twice-as-often delivery frequency (delivering every week instead of every other week, as we had done before), our faculty are more aware of what we offer them and have increased their engagement with the newsletter significantly as a result.
A significant increase in engagement (event registrations)
As we measured event registrations under the new strategy, we could see an obvious boost on newsletter-delivery days. The graph below shows an example of registrations for a single event. The event had been advertised similarly in our old newsletter and the new newsletter, yet the registration numbers spiked dramatically under the new format.
(Note: Plan Ahead! is a special, once-a-month issue of the newsletter that features only professional development events. It delivers in place of the Five Things to Know for the week and includes a listing of events for the next seven months, plus four to five banner-ad-style graphics highlighting events of interest coming soon.)
In the first five months of the new newsletter, July 28 to Dec. 31, 2025, we saw an increase in the total number of event registrations of 127.6%. We received 575 more registrations on newsletter days in the last five months of 2025 than we did in the same period in 2024.
The entirety of a newsletter
produced under the new strategy
The newsletter as a true single source of truth
While the increase in total number of registrations on newsletter-delivery days is an indicator of increased open rates and engagement, an increase in the percentage of total event registrations in that period that happened on delivery days is a clear indicator of the newsletter being a single source of truth.
In 2024, only 26.5% of our event registrations happened on newsletter-delivery days. That means that 73.5% of registrations happened as a result of something other than a faculty member seeing/reading about an event in the newsletter. They might have seen an electronic billboard/flier on our digital monitors on campus, heard about an event from their managers, was reminded of the event by a friend, received a one-off targeted email, etc.
Under our new format and strategy, the percentage of total registrations that actually occurred on newsletter-delivery days (compared with the number of people who were registering on days when they did not receive a newsletter) increased by 119.6%, year over year, jumping from that initial 26.5% to 58.2%.
This tells us that people are reading the newsletter and acting on it when they receive it. They are no longer waiting to hear about an event from a second source, such as a one-off email, a billboard-style ad on our digital displays on campus or a mention from their managers.
We can now count on our newsletter mentions reaching a significantly larger audience each week.
What faculty are saying about the newsletter strategy
“Colleagues: Today we had a LEAD [Leadership Enrichment and Development Program] session on faculty development and annual reviews. … During the debrief of the exercise, one group shared that they feel the communication from FAPD is spot on. They (and several others in the room) even knew our news was now 5 things you need to know. They love it! They said they read it right away and have taken action.
“Add to this good news, Aueyia [events manager] reported an uptick in registrations on Mondays after the 5 things email is sent.
“Corie had the vision and expertise to move us to make these improvements. And it’s paying off already. Congrats to Corie for this great feedback and outcome!”