Poynter’s Mel Grau and Kristen Hare wrote a version of this article that first appeared on Inbox Collective. It is republished here with permission.

Poynter started training journalists when it opened its doors nearly 50 years ago. We’ve sent newsletters to journalists and media consumers for the last 10. But we never combined Poynter’s training with Poynter’s newsletters — until this year.

This is a story of how we adapted a core Poynter workshop into a newsletter course, called Work-Life Chemistry, and started charging $50 per user for access. 

Inspired by others in journalism who saw success with email courses — including Inbox Collective’s Dan Oshinsky, Southern California News Group with Garden Party, and The Washington Post with What Day Is It? — we started to think about the possibilities of an email course four years ago. But first, we needed to find the perfect mix of training, people and purpose.  

Working towards a common goal

The audiences for Poynter training and Poynter newsletters overlapped, but in many ways they were distinct. Generally, people who come to Poynter for professional development are looking for a break in their daily grind to focus on growing their skill sets, networks and know-how. These folks typically interact with our faculty and teaching program team, often in person at our headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida. 

People who subscribe to Poynter newsletters aren’t necessarily looking for that sort of training. Often, our subscribers are looking to fold media analysis and news into their daily routine. They get used to hearing directly from our reporters and even engage in virtual conversations with them.

In the same way our audiences are different, our internal teams are different. The people who teach aren’t always the people who send newsletters, and they’re focused on disparate goals. Aligning on a collaboration that made sense strategically took time. In the years between idea and execution, some of the key players joined our teaching team, and Poynter honed its focus on delivering our signature training experiences in new ways to reach new people. We felt like we were finally ready to try to build a training program delivered via email.

And we added one more twist: Unlike many of the products we saw from other newsrooms, we decided that we wanted to try something that readers could pay for. Many of our journalism training programs have an entry free, so it made sense to charge for this, too. But since we wanted to deliver something over email, with no in-person component, we knew we’d need to charge a relatively low price point.

How we picked the right crossover product

Poynter offers dozens of core workshops and seminars for different audiences, and we considered a variety of factors when picking the right training to become a newsletter. We wanted the training to have:

• Broad appeal — To grow from a workshop for 30 people at a time to a subscriber base of thousands, the training needed to be interesting to people beyond our core audience of journalists. 
• Continued relevance — The training couldn’t be time-bound or too trendy.   
• Brand relevance and intellectual property — What could Poynter uniquely deliver? What are we known for? 
• Advocates — We wanted a group of dedicated alumni who could vouch for the impact of the training and spread the word. 

Looking through our workshop offerings, one checked all the right boxes: Work-Life Chemistry is a workshop developed by Kristen Hare several years ago to teach people how to ditch work-life balance for a more flexible and sustainable approach. During the workshop, each participant creates their own Work-Life Chemistry formulas to stay engaged, make decisions with confidence and find joy. It’s a workshop that’s relevant to anyone who wants to be more mindful and confident about their decisions regarding work and life, including parents and caregivers, leaders, entrepreneurs, creatives, educators, freelancers and others. 

We also know that the course works: Thousands of journalists and news leaders from around the world have created their own Work-Life Chemistry formulas. Some alumni, or “lab partners,” still meet today to keep each other accountable or even evolve their Work-Life Chemistry formulas. Other alumni who work at the same organization use their formulas in planning meetings during crises to keep calm and help them do their best work. 

These folks could help us test the newsletter, provide testimonials and share it with their networks.   

Picking the right sending cadence for the newsletter

Hare, who was a reporter at Poynter before becoming faculty, also writes a weekly Local Edition newsletter. She also developed an obituary newsletter, How They Lived, for the Tampa Bay Times. 

Hare’s main focus now is teaching and coaching, and while she’s well-versed in the newsletter space, we didn’t want the lessons and impact of this teaching to get diluted through an ongoing newsletter. So instead of sending something every day or every week, we chose to build the email version of Work-Life Chemistry as a course. Readers would pay for access and then receive a series of emails — each with a new lesson — in their inbox. With a course, a reader could sign up today, tomorrow or a year from now, and they’d still receive the same information.

Plus, our main goals are to experiment with sharing Poynter training in a new format and see if we could grow our audience. We want to bring our teaching to where people are, and often that’s not in St. Petersburg. 

Translating the in-person to the inbox

In person, Work-Life Chemistry is usually a 90-minute session. We started by working through the in-person teaching’s natural parts, from the intro to a series of activities that walk people through finding their formula. It quickly broke into pieces we could turn into six newsletter editions. We decided that we’d send one email a week, so students had the time every week to work on the lessons before moving on to the next one. Building it as a course also meant that we could easily incorporate Hare’s voice into each edition. The emails come from her, and we wrote the emails so students of the course feel like Hare is personally walking them through the lessons.

But we worried about how to translate some parts of the workshop. Work-Life Chemistry, taught in person, begins with an icebreaker that involves bringing someone to the front of the room, handing them eggs to hold in different hands to represent work and life, and finally throwing an egg once their hands are full to show how impossible it is to hold work and life separate. The eggs always break, and participants immediately grasp the big concept: You’ve got to find the right mix of work and life for you. 

How on earth could we translate that concept into something for a newsletter? 

At first, we worried the egg demonstration wouldn’t make sense unless we had a video or photos, and decided not to include it. After a few drafts, we realized that making this point — that we can’t hold our work and our life in two separate hands — was a powerful way to understand the big concept behind the course. 

So in addition to trying to visually show it, we did our best to walk people through what it looks like in person. 

(Screenshots from Work-Life Chemistry email course)

Another in-person piece that works very well is talking with a lab partner. Rather than try to recreate that in the newsletter, we decided to give people options. They could work on their own. They could share their work with someone in their life and use them as their lab partner. Or they could do a combination of the two. 

Finally, the discussion questions and reflection time that are core to the in-person experience became worksheets that newsletter subscribers could download and fill out. The initial version of the course included three worksheets, such as the “inside-outside” activity to start thinking about how students actually spent their time both inside and outside of work. This “homework” gave them a chance to reflect and make progress on the creation of their Work-Life Chemistry formula in the days until the next email.

Making the inbox experience special with visuals

We worked with a talented freelance illustrator named Jenn Liv to create art, including a logo, progress bar and dividers. The way Hare talks and writes is lively, and we needed visuals to match her bright tone and help convey abstract concepts. 

The progress bar was key: Spaced out over six weeks, we knew that subscribers would need visual cues about how much of the learning journey they had completed.

Some of the new art now helps in our marketing efforts and has found its way into the slide deck for the in-person workshop, but some art is exclusive to the email course.

Examples of the progress bars from the first three emails.

Soft launch lessons

We quietly rolled out an accelerated Work-Life Chemistry email course in December for select Poynter staffers, friends of Poynter and alumni. We asked each person to fill out a survey to capture their insights. 

We heard positive feedback about the value of our worksheets, so we created one more. 

Originally, our learning management system also housed the worksheets, recommended readings, and an archive of all the email content. We heard from our test group that this added too many layers of complexity. Users were already expected to go through a purchase process to pay for the course. Asking users to also sign in to our learning management system when they preferred to stay in their inbox was asking too much. After the testing phase, we removed the website component altogether and opted to stick closer to a traditional newsletter sign-up process than our usual online course sign-up process.

We stayed closer to our framework for online courses when it came to price, though. We had recently reviewed our online learning catalog to bring more consistency to Poynter’s asynchronous courses and adjusted pricing across the board to $50. Work-Life Chemistry, though a new format, fell into that pricing structure.

New year, new email course

Because the concept of Work-Life Chemistry is rooted in self-discovery and overall well-being, we planned to hard launch the email course in early January 2024 to build on the resolution energy of a new year. We partnered with our audience engagement team to plan weekly posts and Instagram Reels, as well as a LinkedIn Live event that featured alumni who spoke about the impact of their Work-Life Chemistry formulas. Telling stories about how our training is used in the real world through our alumni was extremely helpful in showcasing the value of the newsletter course and justifying the price tag. To thank our core alumni group for their feedback and recommendations, we offered a variety of coupons to access the course at a discounted rate for themselves and their friends. 

(Screenshots from Poynter’s Instagram Stories)

Early newsletter metrics are promising. Our overall open rate for the series has stayed consistent at 85%, and certain emails have a click-to-open rate of 65% or higher. The first email in the series has the highest open rates, but we didn’t drop off too much by email No. 5 or 6, which shows a continuing engagement with the material.

In retrospect

Since our launch, we’ve made a few tweaks that we wish we would have included in the beginning:

• We added a survey to our final email, but it’s not the No. 1 thing to do in that email. We wish we had restructured that email lesson originally to emphasize feedback. Including a quick reaction poll or one-question survey midway through the course would have also given us some more customer insight. 
• We also added a bonus email to thank subscribers for going along for the ride, and the email includes a refer-a-friend discount.  

A big lesson for Poynter from this process is there is a place for our live teaching and our lively newsletters to meet. It took some time for us to make our vision a reality, but now we have the right people in the right roles, we have time-tested technology and workflows, and we have a catalog of training ripe for rediscovery.