Electronic Communications

Annual Report – Dec. 4, 2012

The Electronic Communications is our newest committee, established in July of this year. It grew out of the Ad Hoc Email Policy Committee that was chaired by Robin Schaffer.

It’s been a busy year for us. Much of our time was spent working on creating automated procedures to help us send out the Minstrel-Gram from Constant Contact and we sent our first Minstrel-Gram from Constant Contact on Nov. 23. The mailings for Minstrel staff were added earlier this year. With the addition of the Minstrel-Gram and the Minstrel staff mailings, we have met our goal of consolidating all Folk Project mass email through Constant Contact.

Beginning with the Spring 2012 Festival, we began using Constant Contact for Festival registration and surveys. We are also using it to send out email blasts to our membership, including renewal reminders, emergency closings, meeting notices and the like.

Some statistics for you: we now have just under 3000 contacts. We have an average open rate of 29.6%, which is the percentage of our emails that are opened. That compares quite favorably with the average for the entertainment industry, which is 15.6% and for non-profits, which is 21.7%. Our click rate is also very positive. The click rate is the percent of people who, having opened one of our emails, go on to click one of the links in the email. Please note that not all of our emails contain hyperlinks. Our click rate averages 14.6%, compared to 10.1% for the entertainment industry and 11.5% for non-profits.

I’d like to thank John Lamb, Allan Kugel, Robin Schaffer and Liz Pagan for their help with this work.

Lori Falco

Electronic Communications Chair