ZPDI2990 - Digital Marketing for Community Media: Email and Newsletter Campaigns for Audience Growth and Impact

Course Description

Want to learn valuable marketing and media skills while supporting community-rooted news and information in Cleveland?

This free eight-week course offers a portable, career-ready toolkit in digital email marketing — spanning market research, email acquisition, campaign design and more — while pairing participants with real projects that support community media outlets across the city. 

This is career-track skill building with immediate civic impact: students leave with a portfolio of hands-on marketing experience while developing and producing actual email campaigns for the Neighborhood and Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland. Participants will learn how to design engagement and marketing strategies for brand awareness and email list growth, build compelling newsletter products, develop ad campaigns and sponsorship packages that generate revenue, and conduct the market research and needs assessments that drive smart growth decisions. These valuable skills can transfer to a variety of job opportunities or to catalyze your own business, newsletter or media project. 

Together, participants will learn while laying the groundwork for a citywide support system that helps community-powered journalism thrive.  

This program is facilitated by staff from Neighborhood Media Foundation, Rhonda Crowder & Associates and Journalism + Design Lab at The New School. 

Learner Outcomes

Upon completion, participants will be able to:

• Design engagement and digital marketing strategies for building brand awareness and email acquisition
• Use marketing automation software to create compelling email newsletter products that elevate content and create ad opportunities 
• Build opportunities for digital ad campaigns and newsletter sponsorships that can generate revenue
• Conduct market research, needs assessments and other research that can inform opportunities to grow newsletter products
• Leverage these 21st-century marketing and automation skills for career advancement and entrepreneurship 

Notes

Students must be familiar with basic digital tools and comfortable using a computer. 

Participants who complete the program will also have the opportunity to apply for a paid 12-week fellowship in Spring 2027. This fellowship will be an opportunity to apply skills learned during the course and work with Rhonda Crowder & Associates and Neighborhood Media Foundation to build and grow email products and campaigns for a network of community media outlets in Cleveland.

INSTRUCTORS

Rhonda Crowder is a veteran journalist and CEO of Rhonda Crowder & Associates (RCA). RCA is a 15-year, Cleveland-based creative services agency that specializes in developing marketing-communications strategies for brand, public awareness and fundraising campaigns. Additionally, RCA has designed curricula for early childhood literacy, supplemental high school education and youth workforce development programs.  

Wayne Dailey is an award-winning creative director from the Los Angeles market. He worked as an art director for the Los Angeles Times for more than 20 years. His Fortune 500 brand identity experience allows him to create campaign experiences across print, online, broadcast and interactive media.

Rich Weiss is the publisher of The Tremonster (the community newspaper for the Tremont neighborhood) and vice president of the Neighborhood & Community Media Association of Greater Cleveland (an association of 20 ethnic and community media outlets).  He is executive director of the Neighborhood Media Foundation (NMF), a nonprofit that supports media produced by and for communities. Weiss and his wife, Cleveland State Writing Instructor Amanda Lloyd, began producing The Tremonster together in 2011. Through NMF, Rich has helped launch West Park Times, The East Clevelander Magazine, CoffeeTime Podcast and La Villa CLE and has been a consultant to many more Cleveland community publishers in their efforts to revive, sustain and grow reporting by and for communities.