U.S. Department of Labor works to put out exemplary e-newsletter

Its interactive design, recycling and repurposing of news stories, and links to slideshows, videos and valuable resources helped the U.S. Department of Labor’s DOL News Brief take top honors in the 2012 PR Daily Awards as Best Electronic Newsletter.

We congratulate the team that collaborated on the winning effort: Treci Johnson, director of social media; Sharon Botwin, special assistant; Andy Bailey, acting director of the division of business enterprise communications; and Carl Fillichio, senior advisor of the office of affairs and communications.

This in-house designed electronic newsletter goes out 51 weeks of the year, reaching more than 115,000 subscribers, with a net gain of 450 subscribers each week—impressive numbers considering the Department’s employee base of 17,000.

The newsletter’s crisp, uncluttered format includes prominent, easy-to-use links to a mix of slideshows, videos, news releases, blog posts, resources and more. Among its content are stories about workers who have been helped by the Department’s programs, articles about regulatory actions, and “News you can use” on a variety of workplace-related topics.

DOL News Brief is a well-polished example of how aggregated content, disseminated electronically and promoted with social media, can help an organization successfully spread its news. In addition, hundreds of people attending DOL events say they learned of them through the newsletter’s calendar section.

To view the winning work, please click here.