E-COMMUNICATIONS

Electronic Communications Committee Annual Report – December 2, 2014

It’s been a busy year for the Electronic Communications Committee. We now have 3605 contacts, an increase of 329 over last year’s number of 3276. Our open rate for the past three months is 25.9%, slightly less than last year, when we were at 27.8%. Our click rate is 13.4%, which is up from 11.4% last year and a very good rate. Over the past three months, we sent out 24,538 individual emails.

We regularly send out emails from each of our venues – Swingin’ Tern, the Minstrel, the Getaway, and Special Concerts – as well as notifications about the e-newsletter, membership renewals, Minstrel flyers and calls for volunteers. This past year we also sent out emails to publicize the NERFA one-day conference and the Bloomfield Eco- Fest, advertise the new Folk Project T-shirts and alert people to schedule changes due to inclement weather.

As an example of the power of email marketing, I’d like to take you through what happened with the email we sent out to advertise the Special Concert featuring Jonathan Edwards and Lucy Kaplansky, which was held on November 21. We sent out an email advertising the concert late in the afternoon of November 18. It included links to a video by each of the performers and also to the Special Concerts page on our website. The Special Concerts page had the link to PayPal where people could order advance tickets online.

We sent out 2,690 emails and 768 were opened, a 29.3% rate, which is excellent. The click rate for the email was 18%, also very good, which means that 138 people clicked on links in the email. Right after the email was delivered, we saw a surge in ticket sales on PayPal, which continued over the next two days. Ticket sales in that period reached a total of 31 tickets totaling $930.

The Getaway continues to use Constant Contact to conduct surveys after each event and we also used the survey facility to find a new date for the December Home Made Music Party at the end of last year when a snow storm forced us to cancel the original date.

For the first time this year, we used Constant Contact to handle registration for the Uke New Jersey Festival. The Getaway continues to use Constant Contact for registration, as it has done for many years.

In addition to linking our emails to our Facebook change, this past year we started linking emails to our new Twitter account.

Constant Contact has been a valuable tool for us, but of course it is not free. This past year it cost us $714, up from $630 last year. The increase is because Constant Contact raised their rates and because we are making greater use of their offerings, which means an increase in our costs.

In 2014 the Folk Project was once again named a Constant Contact All Star. In their notification, Constant Contact told us, “This status is an annual designation that only 10%of our customers achieve for their use of Constant Contact products. The standards for becoming an All Star this year were tougher than ever, and that you managed to do it for consecutive years is quite an accomplishment.”

Respectfully submitted, Lori Falco