Supporting work · Editorial packaging · Newsletters
Newsletter operations
Stand Together’s flagship newsletter and its K-12 education edition needed consistent story selection, sequencing, and packaging every month, and the packaging decisions, not the send mechanics, were the performance lever available to editorial.
My contribution
I managed story selection and editorial packaging for both: 4–5 stories a month for the flagship, 2 for K-12, covering sequencing, headlines, blurbs, subject lines, preheaders, and ICYMI curation. List management and send infrastructure belonged to the lifecycle team.
The decision that shows the lever
A November 2025 issue led with a foster-care mentorship story. Instead of describing the program, I angled the packaging around the reader’s stake in the mentorship relationship. That issue hit a 2.7% click rate against a 1.3% twelve-week average.
| Approach | What the packaging leads with | Click rate |
|---|---|---|
| Program-description framing | What the organization does and how the program works | 1.3% (12-week average) |
| Reader-stake framing (chosen) | The mentorship relationship and what is at stake in it | 2.7% |
Context
The two newsletters reached 31.5K combined active subscribers (42K across all measured newsletter audiences), with open rates of 53.1% and 67.3% respectively in January 2026.