EPIC India was a little more than two years old when I joined in January 2017 as its first India-based communications hire. The newsletter took another year and a half, plus months of internal sign-off, before the first edition went out in June 2018. Research institutes don’t usually run monthly newsletters, and the general feeling in the room was that monthly was ambitious for a team producing empirical economics work that takes months to simplify for a non-economist. We took the leap anyway.
September 2026 – edition hundred. Uninterrupted.
It’s easy to read “hundred editions” and move straight past it, so let me slow down and think about what that number actually means. It means a hundred months where someone on my team sat down, pulled together what the research had produced that month, decided what mattered enough to share, and sent it. No missed month. Not during a pandemic, not during leadership transitions, not during the stretch when the content inflow slowed or even when the team size shrunk.
I say “someone on my team” deliberately. I started this newsletter under the guidance of my comms director at EPIC in Chicago, but I didn’t carry it all on my own. Different people on my team did that across different years, each of them asking the same question every month: what do we have to say this time? Some months the answer was obvious. Other months it took real digging, because a research paper does not care what day your newsletter goes out, and sometimes there simply was not a big finding sitting there waiting to be turned into a cover story. On those months, the team learned to look sideways and master the art of repurposing high-value content, whether that meant writing a story on ongoing research, humanising a finding, or giving an old media interview a second life. The idea was to keep the newsletter relevant and consistent in a way that it contributes to brand building.
The newsletter as you see it today barely resembles what we sent in 2018. It started as text and some visuals. Then we began borrowing ideas from newsletters we admired, other research institutions and foundations doing this better than we were, and folding those in. We added audio and more visuals and diversified the type of content to include both long-form and short-form. We rebuilt the layout more than once and continued to make improvements to the content flow as well as the visual look of each edition. Looking back, that’s really what the last eight years have been – picking up whatever worked elsewhere, testing it against our own storytelling, and folding it into how we tell EPIC India’s story.
Gradually, as EPIC India launched its YouTube channel, its LinkedIn page, and its Instagram handle, the newsletter became the one place where everything comes together, pulling in the best of everything from those platforms, in whatever mix of audio, video, and text made sense that month, and sending it out to the people who needed to see it – government officials, funders, state partners, researchers we work alongside.
Interestingly, this newsletter has outlasted specific research projects, specific staff, specific communication trends. It has arrived every month through people joining and moving on, through changes in what we were researching and how we told those stories, through shifts in the platforms and audiences we were writing for. EPIC India turns 12 this September, and this newsletter has carried eight and a half of those years. Now it’s about to carry the work we are doing under the Institute for Climate and Sustainable Growth too.
People sometimes ask why we still bother with a monthly newsletter when everything moves through feeds and notifications. The answer is that it reaches every stakeholder, every month, and reminds them what EPIC India stands for. Edition hundred is proof that an old format, kept current, still puts your work in front of the people who matter, every single month.
Swipe through some of our editions over the years.
