Introducing GroupNews

I have worked in university administration for my entire career. Departments in higher education tend to work in silos, with staff concerned mainly with their own responsibilities and projects. As a result, a common complaint among workers in the industry is that "nobody knows what anyone else is doing." There are efforts toward internal communication, but they are mostly ineffective. Emails get buried in overflowing inboxes. I have sat through long meetings with representatives from other departments, and there is usually an "updates" portion of the schedule. The intention is noble, and we all do our best to give lively updates about whatever is going on in our department, but it can be hard to listen for long among the many distractions in the modern workplace.

I shared this problem one day with my older brother Michael, a brilliant computer programmer who has been a consultant in many industries. He let me in on the dark secret that this internal communication problem I spoke of was not limited to higher education. It is a familiar pain known to any organization with multiple areas working towards a common goal.

So we started thinking: there has to be a better way. We kept returning to this idea and began discussing building something new that might help solve the "nobody knows what anyone else is doing" problem.

We started asking questions: how do organizations keep everyone in the loop? What tools allow a group to share updates systematically and consistently? There are many communication tools, yet this problem persists. Email is overused. Chat systems like Slack and Teams are great but are unstructured and freeform. Websites help but can't be updated easily. We concluded that what was lacking was a singular "source of truth" for organizations, an internal communication hub where members from different areas could easily access and contribute. The benefits of such a system – fewer meetings and less email – seemed obvious and alluring.

From this exploration, GroupNews was born.

We founded GroupNews on the belief that every organization and group can be empowered when everyone knows what's going on. GroupNews makes this a reality by allowing any group to create, collaborate on, and publish beautiful automated online newsletters with incredible ease.

A GroupNews account is made up of any number of individual newsletters. You decide who gets access to each newsletter, who can write for it, and when it gets published. GroupNews does the rest. Contributors are reminded via email to submit any stories they have. Stories can be anything: updates, events, links, announcements, fun stuff - even pictures and video. You decide. Writing stories is easy and intuitive. Categories of stories can be as broad or as limited as you want them to be. When the newsletter deadline hits, GroupNews combines all story submissions into a beautiful online newsletter. When a newsletter is published, all group members get a notification with a link to your organization's own GroupNews website. They can also join discussions on any story. Each newsletter is archived indefinitely as an invaluable tool of institutional history and knowledge.

At GroupNews, our mission is to allow any group to keep its members updated and in the loop easily.