Say Hello to GroupNews

It started as a back-of-the-napkin idea that my brother Christian and I were bandying about not too long after the world went into COVID lockdown. Remote work was a new reality for a whole lot of people. Everyone was finding their footing in the uncertainty. Many people were learning how to negotiate new-to-them tools like Zoom effectively.

Despite all that Zooming, not to mention the email and messaging apps, effective communication across teams of any significant size was a challenge. 

Lockdown threw that fact into sharp relief. Even now, when we’re mostly back to a relative “normal,” breaking through silos and keeping everyone informed of team-wide news remains a real problem.

Today, we’re introducing a new approach to solving the issue of ineffective cross-team communication. Today, we’re opening the doors to the platform we’ve been planning and building for the past two years to answer that call.

Today, say hello to GroupNews.

What Exactly Is GroupNews?

First and foremost, GroupNews is a news publishing platform for your organization. You can think of it as a version of The New York Times, The Washington Post, or your favorite online newspaper with your team front and center. Organize and publish the content your team needs to know. Everyone involved has easy access to it on your private GroupNews site. GroupNews can also serve as an effective marketing channel for your organization, giving you a compelling platform to publish your news to the world.

Another way to think of GroupNews is as a platform that combines the best aspects of your favorite email newsletters with the internal focus of a messaging app like Slack or Teams. Many of the best email newsletters are published on a schedule, so you know when to expect new content from them. GroupNews adopts this scheduled approach to publishing new content to your GroupNews site.

GroupNews also sidesteps some of the more problematic aspects of those tools. For instance, email newsletters live primarily in your inbox, where they can get overlooked or lost. Messaging apps, with their endless stream of updates, tend to be disruptive and unstructured. GroupNews’ scheduled publishing model pushes new content to your GroupNews site at predictable times, where it is always available for your team to review and discus

All Business, All The Time?

While we set out to build GroupNews for business, we quickly realized that it could be a compelling platform for many other situations. Extended families, non-profit groups, condo associations, book clubs, and religious institutions are just a few. Each of these groups can benefit from using GroupNews to stay connected across town, across the country, or across the world.

I’m sure there are countless scenarios that we haven’t thought of where GroupNews can be useful. We're just getting started, and we can’t wait to see how you put GroupNews to use for you and your teams.

Photo by Alexander Shatov on Unsplash.