Michelle Deshotels

10% engagement rate.

By most metrics, that’s a failure. If I told you I built a monthly newsletter and only 10% of staff actively read it, you’d probably tell me to kill it and try something else.

Except 100% of new hires used it.

Let me explain why success isn’t always what it looks like.

The Problem

I was working at a fast-growing consulting firm with 170+ distributed employees. People were spread across the world, working remotely, joining the company at different points in its evolution. And there was this massive tribal knowledge problem.

New hires would ask questions like “Why do we do it that way?” or “When did that policy start?” and the answer was always some version of “Oh, that was discussed in an all-hands meeting six months ago” or “That came out of the leadership offsite last year.”

Training can’t fix that. You can’t build a course called “Everything That Happened Before You Got Here.” Well, you could, but it would be obsolete in a month, and nobody would take it.

The Solution (That Nobody Read)

I built a monthly newsletter. One page. Minimal scrolling. Visually engaging.

The purpose wasn’t just to communicate – we already had Slack and email for that. The purpose was to create institutional memory.

I curated the “big org things” from all-hands meetings and turned them into written, searchable content. Then I uploaded each newsletter as a PDF to our LMS, making everything text-searchable rather than buried in slide decks or meeting recordings.

This wasn’t “read this and delete it” communication. This was “here’s a permanent record of what happened when.”

And I didn’t leave adoption to chance. I embedded newsletter reviews into new hire onboarding. Every new employee went through past issues as part of getting up to speed. This was intentional design, not merely hoping people would stumble across it.

Results (That Might Look Like Failure)

10% of existing staff engaged with it monthly.

That’s… not impressive. I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

But here’s what I noticed:

• Staff weren’t reading newsletters as they came out—they were reading multiple issues at once during slower periods. Someone would have downtime and catch up on the last three months of company context in one sitting.

• More importantly, they weren’t checking their email for the latest newsletter. They were searching the LMS months later when they needed specific information. “When did the sales challenge start? When does it end? Where’s the documentation for claiming rewards?”

• They’d search, pull up the March newsletter, and have everything they needed in one place—not scattered across Slack threads, meeting recordings, or someone else’s memory.

And new hires? 100% of them used it.

Because when you join a company that’s been around for years, you’re missing all the context everyone else has. You’re showing up to a conversation that started long before you arrived.

The newsletter gave them a way to catch up. Not just on policies or processes, but on the culture—what the company valued, how decisions got made, what the leadership cared about.

Why This Matters

It’s not that we measure the wrong things. It’s that we don’t always measure the right thing based on our goals.

You have to start with the end in mind.

If you just heard about a new policy in an all-hands meeting, you might not read the newsletter immediately. You were there. You got the information in real time.

But six months from now, when you’re trying to remember when the sales challenge began, when it ends, and where to find the documentation on how to claim your reward? That’s when you need the newsletter.

You’re not going to scroll back through six months of Slack messages or dig through meeting recordings to find one five-minute segment where someone mentioned the details.

You’re going to search the LMS for “sales challenge” and pull up the newsletter from March that has everything in one place.

The newsletter solved a problem that training alone couldn’t fix: removing tribal knowledge and making company context accessible to people who weren’t there when it happened.

My big thing is eliminating as much tribal knowledge as possible. When the answer to “How do I do this?” is “Oh, ask Sarah, she knows,” you’ve created a single point of failure, and you’ve made that information inaccessible to anyone who doesn’t know to ask Sarah.

The newsletter created a single source of truth for “what happened when.” Not for immediate consumption, but for future reference.

The Takeaway

Success isn’t always high engagement. Sometimes it’s solving the right problem.

10% monthly engagement sounds like failure until you realize:

• You embedded it into onboarding, so 100% of new hires use it
• Existing staff consume it when they need context, not when you send it
• It eliminates tribal knowledge by making information accessible
• Success isn’t “did they read it this month?” but “can they find what they need six months from now?”

Measure the right thing for your goal. If your goal is institutional memory and reference documentation, open rates are the wrong metric.

Start with the end in mind. Then measure what actually matters.

And if 100% of new hires are using your solution to get up to speed faster, and existing staff can find answers to “when did that start?” without asking three people or digging through months of Slack—you’ve succeeded.

Even if the open rate sucks.