What's the most modern way of doing a Newsletter?
An apartment manager I know has started to put out a quarterly newsletter for all 200+ of her tenants. She writes it in MS Word, then creates a PDF version which she sends out via email.
Her problem is that she hardly has any tenant's email addresses. Her way of soliciting them is to post a paper copy of the newsletter in the lobby & the laundry room with a side note asking readers to send her their email address if they want future versions electronically. This is not working.
I want to tell her why her scheme is failing ....
(a) PDF-to-mass-email is old-school 'push' technology
(b) people today want 'pull' technology (they choose & retain control over subscription)
(c) people are reluctant to give out their email addy, because they're afraid it will fall into the wrong hands (specially since the apartment manager forgeting how to use Blind Carbon Copy is an easy-to-imagine scenario, thus exposing their email addy to 199+ strangers who'll think nothing of selling them to stealth marketeers, leading to more spam).
(d) it's a pain for the author to manage an ever-changing email rolodex
.... but that doesn't mean I know what the best substitute is today.
(1) Surely she can create her own website, but that's too complex for her computer skills.
(2) Not sure if Google Docs would work. It's meant for collaboration, not 1-author-200-passive-readers. Plus, isn't new-content-notification still relying on emails? Gotta avoid that.
(3) I guess she could do it as a blog. News items get published individually immediately (they don't become ancient news by the next quarter). Are there any free or low-cost blog sites out there? Is RSS the term we use for the process of attaching an attribute to webpages so that when it gets new content, it's either pushed down to the client's browser or the client is somehow otherwise notified?
What other tools are out there for accomplishing pull-technology 'newsletters'?
