The global communications department wanted a newsletter design that integrated content from our external sites, Merck and MSD, our intranet, and high level social media posts. 

Our department requested that the design was just one newsletter that brought the all the content together as this was going to be an internal communication.

I researched some layouts that could work with our CRM system to make the experience as responsive as possible with the technology in place. The design and layout of the newsletter needed to be intuitive and easy to navigate. 

The newsletter was going to be deployed every week to about 70,000 employees in the U.S an around the world.

First, we needed a name for the newsletter. Our team had a contest and they picked my suggestion, "In Scope." Our company is a premier research-intensive biopharmaceutical company so the name inspiration came from the word "microscope" as wall as the logo I designed. 

After the name was established I went ahead and brainstormed on the sections we needed depending on the content we were going to include. These sections needed to be consistent as this was going to be an ongoing internal publication.

I also brought in our branding colors and style into the newsletter design to keep everything adherent to our corporate brand which is extremely important as we were still in the process of rolling out a lot of the branding elements we are using today. 

All of the copywriting is done by our team of content creators. My editor-in-chief provides the links and copy of all the content and I format the newsletter and make sure all testing is done before scheduling and deployment. 

We have been sending this newsletter constantly since March 2021 and it has been a success as it has helped boost the traffic driven to high-level stories from the newsletter. We are able to track these metrics by adding UTM tags to all URLs used in the newsletter.  

I continue to tweak and make improvements as we are also in the search of another CRM system that can improve the delays we experience with deployment and that can really make the content responsive across all operating systems and devices.