Email Fail

I am completing my placement with a company who specialises in the diagnosis of osteoporosis (brittle bone disease) and every two months I am presented with the task of writing our newsletter. The underlying topics usually include any new developments in osteoporosis research (i.e. new treatments, risk-factors, exposed myths) and updates to do with our company (i.e. opening/closing of clinics, new staff members).
The target audience for this newsletter includes our employees and patients. To distribute the newsletter to employees it is simply a matter of forwarding the PDF through our intranet email.
Reaching our patients is an entirely different matter.
For those of you who know anything about osteoporosis I am sure you are aware that this disease is generally labelled as an older-person's disease. Thus the majority of people reading the newsletter are by and large in the elderly category.
Our newsletters are uploaded onto the company website where they are available to read online, but most of our patients have little or no interest in the internet let alone the ability download PDF copies of our newsletter from the webpage. At the moment the best way to reach our patients with the newsletter is by providing hardcopies in all our clinics, to doctors suguries near our clinics and to the ABC nurses and other health care workers who support our services. It is not feasible for our company to post hardcopies of the the newsletter to patients individually (although many have asked us to do so).
Recently we attempted to create an email list of patients so we could electronically forward the newsletter to them in the same way we do with employees. Every patient who books a bone-scan with our company is required to complete a questionnaire during their appointment. We added "Would you like our company to forward you electronic newsletters?" to the questionnaire in an attempt to generate a database.

A quote from the younger online generation summarises this attempt perfectly: "EPIC FAIL"

After two months we have not had one single patient indicate they would like to receive the newsletter electonically... though many still want it in the mail.

I guess this shows that although new technology is a great way to reach some audiences, ours just isn't one of them. Back to the drawing board,


Kind Regards,

Ashleigh Coyle