ITD Alliance Newsletter History

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Until the end of 2023, communication with members by the Leadership Board (through the Executive Secretary) was intermittent. In 2024, as inaugural President, Gabriele Bamer produced a newsletter every two months, with newsletters published in February, April, June, August and October, 2024. The Executive Secretary, and then Interim Executive Secretary, mailed out an overview of the newsletter contents using MailChimp, with the full newsletter available as a pdf, which is stored on the ITD Alliance website at https://itd-alliance.org/newsletter/. Newsletters were produced early in the relevant month.

In October and November 2024 there was a considerable amount of time-sensitive news to report, such as the General Assembly election results and information about a range of ITD Alliance events. The newsletter was therefore replaced by a weekly News Bulletin, with the Interim Executive Secretary, Caryn Anderson, taking over production. The News Bulletins are considerably shorter than the newsletters, with the full contents mailed out using MailChimp and also stored on the website as a pdf.

In February 2025, a new feature “Member Publications” was added to increase member interaction, resulting in publications announced in almost every issue. A “Consult the Community” feature was trialled in late 2024, but did not generate much interest. In FY24-25 (1 September 2024 – 31 August 2025), 27 issues were published with over 200 items. A total of 16,929 News Bulletin emails were sent to subscribers (an average over the 27 issues of 627 subscribers per News Bulletin). 73.7% of all emails were opened, and at least one link was clicked in 20.7% of all emails. The August 2024 Newsletter was distributed to 450 subscribers (347 members, 103 non-members). As of 31 August 2025, the News Bulletin had 747 subscribers (477 members, 270 non-members) – an increase of 66%.

The newsletters and news bulletins are vehicles for sharing information about the activities of the leadership board and executive secretary, working groups, ITD Alliance projects, regional networks, as well as institutional and individual members. The names and affiliations of new and renewing members are also published. The newsletters and news bulletins also aim to provide information that may be of interest to members, including opportunities for fellowships and prizes, policy and funding news, and news about conferences and special issues of journals. 

The newsletters and news bulletins are automatically mailed out to members, with non-members invited to become subscribers. The aim is to use the news bulletins (and previously the newsletters) to inform interested people about the ITD Alliance and hopefully attract them to join. 

The aim has also been to notify anyone featured in the newsletter and news bulletin that they were featured, and this is seen as another way of encouraging non-members to join. For the newsletter this was done in the February, April and June issues, but other commitments meant it was not possible for the August and October issues. For the news bulletins, this has been done intermittently.

Some basic statistics are provided below.