Publicity Report

Webmaster Report from John Lamb:

It's been a quiet month on the website. Allan fixed some problems with duplications of names on the administration page. He is now working to produce some new pages that will help Mike migrate the Minstrel-gram to Constant Contact. Lori has been grooming existing contact lists so that we will be less likely to be pushed into a higher price category when we merge Mike's Minstrel-gram list in with the existing CC contact list. I have been helping Robin update the Festival portion of the site and the Festival pre-registration page on Constant Contact. I will be working on that page to prepare it for live registration which will start on March 1. I also spent some time creating a Minstrel Tally Sheet web page that may or may not replace the current spreadsheet now in use. As always, we welcome questions, suggestions and comments sent to webmaster@folkproject.org.

Publicity Committee Report from Nancy Kelner:

Jim Gartner joined the publicity committee in January and will be handling the mailing of paper flyers. Lynn Miles has left the committee to pursue employment full time.

Several January and February Minstrel concerts and Swingin’ Tern dances were listed in the entertainment section of the Cranford Chronicle. This paper is published by the same people who publish the Suburban News.

Jan. 27 Minstrel was listed in the January 2012 monthly email from Princeton On Line. www.princetonol.com

Jennifer Nelson of the Daily Record emailed me; wanted to do an article about Swingin’ Tern. Gave her email addresses for Gloria, Leigh and Doug. Article was published; except for having the old contact phone, it was a nice article. Here is the link: www.dailyrecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2012301200003

ACMA calendar is looking to move to an events calendar that people can fill in by themselves; this should cut down on errors.

Got an email from a woman from www.whofish.com, a countrywide events listing. She found the Feb 10 Minstrel by surfing the Web and posted it on their website. Here is the link (don’t know where the “call before 8 pm” came from): http://www.whofish.org/events/Morristown/NJ/The_Valentines_Day_Extravaganza/1849988.aspx .

Iris Nevins of the Irish American Association of Northwest Jersey (www.iaanj.com) publicizes Minstrel concerts of a Celtic nature in her emails to members. She has notified them of the upcoming Archie Fisher concert on Feb. 17th.

Jennifer Nelson of the Daily Record also emailed me for info on the Valentines show at The Minstrel for an article about Valentines Day-related events. Waiting to see the article online; will send the link to the board when I get it.

Minstrel chairman Mike Agranoff agreed to offer Jersey Arts card holders a two-for-one discount to one regular Minstrel concert in February, March and April. He chose the Feb. 24 Minstrel – Rich Deans. It was listed in the February E-savers email. I was excited to see it and hope we get a few newcomers. Unfortunately, they used “Folk Project” as the venue instead of “The Minstrel” and said a Jersey Arts cardholder had to call in advance to get the discount (when all they have to do is show their card at the door). Luckily, the link to the actual event listing on their site has the correct information. I will do my best to have them use “The Minstrel” as the venue in the March and April two-fer listings.

The Minstrel Valentines Show is listed as one of only four Valentine-related events in northern NJ (and one of only twelve events statewide) on the Jersey Arts website! Here is the link: http://jerseyarts.com/valentine. Again, they listed the venue as “Folk Project” instead of “The Minstrel,” but the link to the actual event is correct.

FaceBook Report from Pam Robinson:

As of Feb 5, 2012 we have 519 people who "like" (formerly Fans) the Folk Project on FaceBook.

For each Concert that we present, I create an "Event", and weekly I post that upcoming Minstrel "Event" to the FP’s "Wall" which then shows up in the fans Newsfeed. FaceBook then tracks how many people each post reaches. (The number of unique people who have seen the post in the first 28 days after a posts publication.) Our posts reach between 80 and 150 pairs of eyes each, with the average being about 120 a week.

We had 2 unusual posts that generated a higher reach: 1/8/12 Robin Schaffer, our newest FB Admin, posted about the Spring Fest.

This post reached 199 people. 1/3/12 Pam created an FB photo album, on the FP’s Page, called Memory Lane and posted pics that Don Reimer scanned from the old Minstrel photo album. This post reached 281 people.

For the 7 days ending Thursday Feb 2 we had a total reach of 442 people. ("The number of unique people who have seen any content associated with our Page from 1/27/12 - 2/2/12. This includes Ads and Sponsored Stories that point to our Page." An Ad can be a free Ad that sometimes appears on people’s sidebars in their Newsfeeds.)

FB Trivia: FaceBook lets people see the sites in different languages. The Folk Project’s FaceBook page is currently being seen in nine different Languages: English (both US and UK), German, Spanish, Turkish, Italian, Pirate, Korean, Russian, Swedish.