A Newsletter People Finish

The brief

Fieldnotes had a newsletter with good numbers at the top and terrible numbers at the bottom. People opened it. People did not read it.

What we did

We shortened it by a third and gave every issue a spine: one idea, one example, one thing to do. Nothing else was allowed in, no matter how interesting.

We also killed the roundup section, which everyone loved writing and nobody read.

The result

Completion went from thirty-one percent to eighty-two. We did it by cutting, not adding, which is usually how this works.