Volunteer-run organizations often spend thousands of dollars on quarterly newsletters and direct mail solicitations. While the groups have the best of intentions, they often lack the in-house graphic designers and high-quality printers to actually produce these goods. Nevertheless, they almost always have blogs, websites and social media profiles for outreach purposes. In the past few months ReadWriteWeb has seen an influx of blog-to-newsletter media solutions. While many technologists have criticized print as a dead medium, blog-to-newsletter tools may be fantastic for advocates and service orgs. Below are a few companies to help get you started:
MagCloud for Wikia: MagCloud has always given users a way to create custom magazines. In 2008, we covered MagCloud as an easy solution for self-publishing. The company’s recent Wikia partnership lets you take your favorite Wikia site and create print pages directly from the admin panel. MagCloud also offers PDF uploads for those with other types of sites.
Fast Pencil: Earlier this month we featured FastPencil, as a company with great publishing and formatting tools for novelists and writers. One of the features of this site is that you can import your blog and it will auto-populate pages of your book. This service would offer a quick integration of your org’s blog and it also offers basic formatting including clean font choices.
Tabbloid: HP Labs’ Tabbloid offers users a chance to select their favorite feeds, aggregate them as PDFs and schedule an email of the PDF. Organizations can add both their feeds as well as the feeds of related news sources. From here they can send their files to donors on a daily or weekly basis.
In the past, ReadWriteWeb covered a number of tools for book publishing; however, these are also great for easy newsletter building. Blurb and Lulu allow users to upload files and create saddle-stitched magazine-style booklets.
