Basic newsletter templates for nonprofit

November 19, 2019 8:19 AM

I volunteer for a nonprofit small dog rescue group, who recently lost its tech-savvy person who handled the newsletter. I've been asked to help out, but my skills are VERY out of practice, and were pretty basic when they were current.

I need a simple template for a standard-sized four-page newsletter that folds into something suitable for mailing. It has to accommodate a letter from the president, a few small stories about cute small dogs (with photos), and a few brief appeals for funding.

I have some out-of-date PhotoShop skills, and some primative image manipulation skills, with some antique Quark layout experience. I'm going to need basic tools (preferably free or free-ish) since I don't keep much software these days.

Ideally, the resulting product can also be converted from the mailed version into a format that can be emailed to an email list as well.

posted by answergrape to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

The best free tool for things like print layout is probably Scribus, so that's where I'd start if I were you. I used that to prepare a for-print PDF recently and it was slightly hard to use but definitely did the job. If you need to do custom graphics, GIMP is the classic and the newer versions are slightly easier to use.
posted by JZig at 8:28 AM on November 19, 2019

Best answer: 100% I'd use Canva for this. There are hundreds of newsletter templates and to print you literally just save as Print PDF.
posted by DarlingBri at 8:39 AM on November 19, 2019 [8 favorites]

Seconding Canva.
posted by sarajane at 10:04 AM on November 19, 2019

Also here to recommend Canva. It is free (with premium options) and easy to use. Here are their newsletter templates. Most of the templates have a template with a cover page and an interior page -- click any of them to see the full template. This one, for instance, might work well.
posted by ourobouros at 10:35 AM on November 19, 2019