Written communication has become the staple of team organization and management, so creating various business-oriented documents often may feel like a daunting task. However, if you create the right template for each of these messages, it will become a daily routine, so let’s see how to write a memorandum that takes no longer than 10 minutes off your workday.
What is a memorandum?
Memorandum is a document used for communicating news, challenges, and solutions within the company or agency. An effective memorandum has to be clear, straightforward and informative.
Depending on their job position and level of involvement, the employees and management can read memorandum in more or less detail. The document needs to be outlined in a manner that transmits the crucial information effectively regardless of the
Before you write a memorandum, you need to determine the most important information and the ultimate goal of delivering them – informing or prompting readers to action.
Business memorandums are specific because you need to keep in mind that not all of your readers have time to read pages and pages of the report until you get to the crucial point. Some of the readers won’t go beyond the introduction and summary, while some may need all the information.
How to write a memorandum
Although most of the communications within the organizations nowadays goes through the online channels, a good business memorandum will maintain the same formatting both in a printed and electronic version.
For example, even though the addresses of all the online recipients will be part of an email, it is important to include them inside the memo as well.
Technical details
Your memo should start with technical details including:
- Recipients. Use the recipients’ full names and include everyone who needs to receive the memorandum. If there are too many recipients, you can substitute their names with a department.
- The person or department issuing the memo. Your name and department need to be clearly identified.
- Date
- Subject. While the subject may seem like a small, easy detail, sometimes it is what makes or breaks your business memorandum. The subject line you put in the memorandum (the same you will put in the email subject) needs to communicate clearly what the document is going to be about.
Focus on the main topic or purpose of your memorandum. Don’t be vague or too broad. For example, if you want your employees or colleagues to prepare a report for a quarterly meeting, subject “Quarterly meeting: personal report request” is much clearer than “Meeting”. This way, the readers will learn news and be prompted to act immediately when they see the memorandum subject.
In the header or on the right side of the, include the logo of your company or agency.
Creating an outline
Your Business memo should follow the simplest possible form – introduction, optional summary, the body, and a conclusion.
Introduction
An introduction is the most important part of business memorandum – because it delivers crucial information. Despite me calling it an introduction, you don’t actually need any “Dear Jane” or introduction as such – get to the point straight away.
Present the news, tell the readers why they are important and what’s the next thing expected of them. The main idea is of the effective introduction is to make sure that the reader has all the important information even if they stop reading after the first paragraph.
For those who will continue reading, you have two options – moving on to summary or the body of the memorandum.
Optional summary
A summary is an option if your business memorandum takes more than one page to deliver all the necessary information.
The summary should be an overview of the main points you address in the memorandum, and it is recommended that you format it with bulletins.
The summary can also be used to digest the main information, a short explanation of the news/challenge/solutions, call to action, and short instructions on how to take further action.
If the memorandum is longer than one page, the outline will help readers find the main points quickly or jump to them if they need to.
The body
Once you get to the body (with or without the outline), you will elaborate on the news you wrote in the introduction. The style should be clear, simple and straightforward. If you are using business vocabulary in your memorandum, make sure that employees on every level can understand it.
The sentences should be short, active, and keep a neutral tone – even if you are delivering bad news.
If the business memorandum is longer, use headings, subheadings, and bulletins to make it easier to digest and understand. The paragraphs should be short – no more than 3-4 sentences.
Conclusion
The conclusion of your business memorandum should include an elaboration on your call to action or recommendations. Explain in more detail what action is to be taken, how, why, and which is the time frame for the course of action.
Still sounds a bit difficult? No worries, here’s the template you can use to write any business memorandum.
Memorandum text example
In this section, I will write an example of memorandum you could circulate in a marketing agency. This text is a longer version – in the following section, I will recreate the shorter version within the pre-designed template.
Shorter memorandum examples
We also created several memorandums in free templates by Canva, keeping them as short as possible. We used the same text from the longer version.
Memorandum template 1
Memorandum template 2
Memorandum template 3
Conclusion
Using these examples and our guidelines, you can create your own template for business memorandums in your agency.
If you need more tutorials and templates for a bit daunting business correspondence, in this article you will find a guide to writing a perfect press release.
