Breaking It Down: The Rambutan Roundup Newsletters
Welcome to Club Rambutan’s Breaking it Down (BID) series, where we shed light on the different areas of operations that make our organization the following three things:
A Creative Collective (Event Planning, Social Media, Rambutan Roundup Newsletters)
A Digital Residency (Cohorts, Artist Resource Group (ARG), Alumni)
A Magazine (Formatting, Shipping Logistics, Packaging Design)
This article will explain a major social aspect of Club Rambutan’s Creative Collective, the Rambutan Roundup Newsletters (RR for short).
The internal reporting structure of the RR Newsletter Structure. Click here to view more.
You might be wondering:
If Club Rambutan already has a magazine, why do we also have a monthly newsletter?
Our magazine comes out every 6-7 months, so approximately twice per year. Each issue is “exclusive” in a way to maximize our platform’s efforts in spotlighting our Cohort Artists, who have each spent the entirety of their Digital Residency with us to design an original project for print. However, we know that our magazines don’t let us engage with our audience as frequently or candidly as we like.
By saying we are a creative collective, it means that we rely on connecting with our local communities to learn from, immerse ourselves in, and share our platform with them.
Our mission, as well as every single project Club Rambutan has rolled out, is purely based on a collaborative approach (just read our 3 guiding values on the home page). So, it only made sense for us to “kill two birds with one stone”: we needed a way to share more about the personalities behind Club Rambutan in a more casual and consistent cadence, while also allowing us to share our platform with creative spheres around us despite not being associated with a Club Rambutan cohort.
So as of September 2024, the Rambutan Roundup Newsletters were born!
“ok, but why are there two NEWSLETTERs?”
There are two cities that the Rambutan Roundup focuses its content on: San Francisco & Phoenix.
This is because these locations are where our in-person teams (“branches”) are based in.
Put it this way - yes, our cohort artists can be based anywhere in the world, but that’s only because our artist residency is completely online (and so are the team members of our Artist Resource Group).
However, it helps that our newsletters are relevant to the physical places that our teams operate out of. This is to narrow down the scope of our content to local-only creative events, grassroots organization, and initiatives that align with our mission.
We hope one day to have the infrastructure to have a more robust newsletter that isn’t location-based, but for right now, the RR’s have been helping us share a more in-depth look into our team.
“How many writers do y’all have?”
Currently, we only have one main writer for each Rambutan Roundup, which we call a “Managing Editor”. The Editor in Chief will also occasionally write for either newsletter depending on the capacity of each M.E. (keep in mind we are all 100% volunteers), and we have one Newsletter Designer, too.
At the end of each month, the Newsletter Designer takes the final articles (which are individually published on this site under the menu option, THE RAMBUTAN ROUNDUP), and formats them all onto Substack. Substack is the literal newsletter where each of their articles are “packaged” in, and are then distributed via an email blast to our subscribers. You can subscribe to the newsletters via our Linktree.
Our squad works together to brainstorm ideas and share all the fun stuff going on around us that month. And we have the flexibility to write editorial content, too! It just has to be pre-approved by the Editor in Chief first.
The overall org chart depicting Club Rambutan’s updated official team structure. Click here to view more.
Interested?
Cohort 04 Team Applications are live now. Apply today until 4/03. We’re looking for all sorts of roles, so make sure to check out the form!
For more questions, shoot us an email at hello@clubrambutan.com. Good luck!
