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I started working at the Marketing and Communications unit of the School of Economics already before Aalto University was born. My main task was to run a weekly staff newsletter named Viikkotiedote. This weekly newsletter was an internal newspaper, which the porter distributed to everyone’s mailbox at the School every Friday.

The content of the weekly bulletin was created so that I took part in events and seminars and wrote short articles based on these visits. I also requested faculty and staff to submit news and event information for the newsletter. Content for the most popular column was probably submitted by the HR unit. This column included information on changes in employment relationships: who had started in a permanent position, who had a fixed-term contract, who had retired, and so on. Depending on the week, the newsletter consisted of 10–20 pages, and it was published only in Finnish with the occasional event summary in English.

I designed the weekly newsletter using InDesign, making sure that the layout file was always ready by 12:00 on Thursday. I then sent the file to HeSe Print*, School of Economics’ own speed printing services, which was located on the ground floor of the School in Runeberginkatu. There, HeSe Print’s Manager Raimo Viitanen and his team made sure that the printers worked fast enough to ensure that the appr. 400 people at the School, whose offices were located in several different buildings, would receive their own newsletter at the end of each week.

In my experience, the internal newsletter has always been a well-liked and important channel of internal communication at the School of Business. The first actual intranet, called Piazza after a naming competition, was built and made available only a couple of years before Aalto University was born. In other words, the weekly newsletter was the only internal communication channel for all members of staff for a long time. Piazza was followed by Inside, and nowadays the intranet content can be found in the For Aalto community section of Aalto’s website (aalto.fi). Even today, people still want to find news and events not only in aalto.fi and in the social media channels, but also in an internal newsletter.

The weekly newsletter was followed by Friday Post, and for several years now, the staff newsletter of the School of Business has been called Business School Post. The newsletter was published every week until autumn 2020, when its frequency was reduced to once every second week. The Business School Post is now published in both Finnish and English, and, naturally, it has been created on an electronic newsletter template.

* HeSe Print merged with Unigrafia Oy (formerly University Press) when Aalto University was established.

Terhi Ollikainen
Communications Specialist

#kauppis110

Read also: The School of Business 110 years

In 2021, we ask former and current members of the School of Business community (especially faculty and staff) to share their memories of the School. These memories will comprise the ‘My Kauppis Memory’ series of stories.