Breaking It Down: 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), Artist 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). You might be wondering:

"If Club Rambutan already has a magazine, why do you also have newsletter?"

Our magazine comes out every 6-7 months. This is about the same amount of time for one cohort to complete its cycle through our digital artist residency. By the end of this term, the respective cohort's issue is published, meaning each of the artists' original projects and interviews are finally revealed.

However, half a year is a looooooong time to work in silence. Our monthly newsletter lets the CR team bridge this gap by engaging with our followers in a more fun, frequent (and more candid) manner. The RR also gives a chance to our internal Club Rambutan team members to share more about ourselves, too!

This might sound counterintuitive, but we believe that a "successful" creative collective is one whose members are already active in other pre-existing art communities around them.

Anyone can make, lead, and own something if all they want to do is to prove that they could. But to truly unite and move people - especially through art - such an organization only grows stronger from what its learned from others, and in the process, itself.

Our mission is purely based on a collaborative approach (just read our 3 guiding values on the bottom of our home page). Skill sharing, being a villager, and representing a higher purpose are not only the standards we use to select our cohort artists, but it's also what we look for in our team members to uphold.

With that being said, the RR also lets us explore and immerse ourselves in our neighboring creative scenes. Our writers often go out and attend, interview, and review local events, businesses, organizations, and current events and trends. Our platform may be small, but we're keen to spread the word about other initiatives that align with our mission.

“OK, but why are there TWO newsletters?”

There are currently 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.

To clarify: 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). Right now, our newsletters help us build stronger relationships with our community members in our respective branches.

Since Cohort 4, we've garnered a larger number of social media followers who aren't based in either city, so the immediate goal is to improve RR infrastructure so that we can create newsletter content that doesn't exclude them.

“How many writers do y’all have?”

Currently, we have two Managing Editors, one for each city. There can be anywhere between one to three other Content Writers for each branch that report up to them. The Editor in Chief may 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 all the articles are “packaged” in for their respective city and month, 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.

Interested?

Shoot us your questions at hello@clubrambutan.com. We also post team openings regularly on our Instagram (@club.rambutan). Good luck!