Publicity Report

September 5, 2011

Publicity Committee Report for September 2011

From Webmaster John Lamb:

The web team responded to the festival registration problem on two fronts. Lori found and fixed an obscure bug on the Flash-based form that now has it working in nearly all cases except for the Safari browser. For those who still have problems, we developed a non-Flash registration form that is not quite as user-friendly, but should work when the other one doesn't.

Most of the rest of the effort this month was on routine site maintenance - fixing typos here and there, adding information in response to extended power outages due to Irene, correcting a setting in the database that was causing text to be truncated, responding to a member having difficulty downloading the newsletter, and so forth.

Joe D'Andrea informs me that the account at mediatemple.com has been closed. That was where he and others had been working a year or two back on a version of the Folk Project site that was never completed. With the closing earlier in the summer of two other hosting accounts, we are now down to a single web hosting provider in dreamhost.com.

The page that will unify subscriptions to our various email lists has not yet been implemented. It appears that Mike Agranoff will be moving the Minstrelgram from the system that he developed over to Constant Contact, where many of the other lists reside. Once that happens, we will proceed with the design of the unified subscription page that was originally scheduled to be up in August.

As always, thanks to Lori Falco and Allan Kugel for their contributions to the site. We welcome comments, suggestions and questions sent to webmaster@folkproject.org.

From Publicity Chairman Nancy Kelner:

The publicity committee continued its work this month to get the word out. Cheryl Cronk and Will Miles have asked for some time off, so I will be looking for people to replace them temporarily.

In August, we were able to add event listings in the Suburban News (a free “throw paper” in Union County) and the Cranford Chronicle.

Parent Guide News emailed and said they want to feature Minstrel in their Sept. issue in the Don’t Miss section. Looked for it, but did not see it online. Perhaps it’s only in the print issue.

Arts Council of the Morris Area calendar still makes errors in our postings, usually in the time. I email Lynn Siebert ask for corrections and they are taken care of.

NJ Skylands magazine emailed me in mid-August and said they’d like to write a story about the Folk Project for their fall issue. Actually, they offered to PRINT a story about the Folk Project if WE wrote it. Jim King wrote a very nice article and sent it to them. NJ Skylands distributes 25,000 print copies, 5,000 to direct mail subscribers; they have 43,000 on-line subscribers; and they claim their website gets 200,000 to 250,000 visits a month.

Morris County Tourism Bureau asked for our logo and some photos for an email blast. On August 17^th, there was a Minstrel listing in the Top Ten and a very nice write-up about Folk Project at the end of the email with our logo. The email blast was sent to approximately 4500 people interested in things to do and see in Morris County. The wording for the write-up came from the Folk Project website itself.

***********

I knew that after I sent out the publicity committee report, something else would come up!

Attached is a copy of the September issue of the NJ Jazz Society newsletter. Tony Mottola did indeed write an article about Frank Vignola (Oct. 28 Minstrel) and John Carlini (Festival). It is on page 15.

Nancy K.