Supporting work · Editorial packaging · Newsletters
Newsletter operations
I managed the story selection and packaging for two monthly newsletters, Stand Together’s flagship and its K-12 education edition. The clearest result came from changing the way one foster-care mentorship story met the reader.
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. The obvious packaging would have described the program: what the organization does, how mentors are matched. I angled it instead around the reader’s stake in the relationship itself. That issue hit a 2.7% click rate, against a 1.3% average across the previous twelve weeks.
This was an editorial judgment call, not a test. The program-description version was never sent, so the 1.3% is the recent baseline the issue was measured against, not the same story under an alternate frame.
| Approach | What the packaging leads with | Click rate |
|---|---|---|
| Recent baseline (twelve-week average) | Mixed, typically what the organization does and how the program works | 1.3% |
| Reader-stake framing (chosen, November 2025) | 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.