Improve your print mag’s deadly leader letter

I’m always changing the 60 ideas — let’s just say that after 25 years of this work, I have way more than 60 ideas! — but one idea that I’ve kept in for talk after talk is about leader letters.

I spend about 30 seconds on this idea in my presentation, but I want to unpack it a little more here.

How I define a “leader letter”

When I talk about leader letters, I’m referring to the pages or columns that are written directly to readers from the top folks at your school and in your institution’s community.

Some common leaders that might have letters in your publication include:

• President or head of school
• Board of trustees chair
• Alumni board chair
• You, the editor!

I consider these all leader letters.

What research says about leader letters

Leader letters are duds. There’s pretty much no other way to say it.

While it is true that the CASE Magazine Readership Survey has found them to be slightly more popular than faculty publication announcements, that’s not saying too much. The survey has found leader letters less popular than almost anything else you could put in your magazine.

This mirrors what I have found in my 25+ years of work in this field.

While people tell me about all sorts of incredible things, big and small, that crush it in their magazine, no one has ever sent me a note to tell me how much folks love the president’s letter.

Mostly, when readers talk about leader letters, they talk about how hard it is to get the president to write one in a timely manner. They talk how hard it is to get approval on one if they’re responsible for ghostwriting it. Or they talk about how they can’t seem to get a single person to care about it.

The correct number of leader letters

Your magazine might have two, three, or even four leader letters. (Are there magazines that have more than four leader letters? Let us be grateful I have yet to see them.)

In my opinion, the maximum number of leader letters you should have in any magazine is ONE.

My preference, given that you are spending a ton of money to print and mail your magazine to your readers, is that you have zero leader letters. But given the political realities of such matters, I concede that most must have one.

BUT ONLY ONE! Please, I beg you.

Sunsetting your extra leader letters

Sometimes, I’ll hear from folks who tell me that they’ve ALWAYS had three leader letters, and how are they possibly going to get rid of them?

First, this feels bonkers to me. Not only do your readers not like these letters, but most of the folks who are writing these letters hate writing them!

Everyone will be happier if they go away.

I include your president’s letter in this, too! If your president hates writing a letter, or demands a ghostwritten one that your team scrambles to write for every issue (and doesn’t get much interest from your prez anyway), ditch that letter, too!

There’s no rule that your president has to have a letter in your magazine. In most cases, the stories you choose to focus on are showcasing the values and priorities of your institution and your leader. Your president doesn’t necessarily need to put a fine point on it with a letter.

I think it’s also almost always great idea to ditch your editor’s letter. Research shows they’re rarely well read, and you can spend more time focusing on creating great material for every page.

Including leader letters that matter

Let’s assume you’ve decided to include a letter from your president. How do you make this (generally loathed) page as effective as it can be?

I have a few things I encourage you to avoid, and a few things you can do to make them better.

• Avoid unnecessarily long letters. A page, max. I prefer 500 words or fewer: enough to make an argument, not enough to ruin a designed page. A two-pager? ABSOLUTELY NOT.
• Avoid the “magazine tour guide” approach. Every time I see a president’s letter that gives a reader a regurgitated table of contents, inviting me to enjoy specific stories that have already been listed on the table of contents a page earlier, it makes me want to throw my laptop into the ocean. This is saying something, since I am a landlocked Minnesotan.
• Do focus on a single highlight. Have your president dive deeply(ish) into a single important topic. Admissions changes? Rankings? A new campaign? Whatever the case, choose ONE thing to go deep on, rather than seven paragraphs on seven different things.
• Do consider a visual approach. One of my favorite leader letters wasn’t even really a letter! It was spread in Barry University Magazine of the president actually out in the world! It was accompanied by maybe 125 words of text:

Amazing!

Your magazine is a tangible object, your institution is a real place in the world, and your president is out there meeting with people and supporting great work.

Show, don’t tell, can be a powerful approach for this page.