E-COMMUNICATIONS

The past month has been a busy one for e-communications. In addition to our usual emails we dealt with two situations requiring special alerts, both due to bad weather.

Due to a snow storm we decided to postpone the December Evening of Music/Holiday Night. We sent out a message telling our members that the party on the original Dec.14 date was cancelled and added a link to a survey in Constant Contact that allowed people to vote on which of several potential new dates they preferred. We had 33 responses to the survey. When the results were tallied, Fri. Dec. 20 was the clear winner. We then sent out a notice informing our members of the new date. I want to give a shout out to everyone who worked on this, as I think we did a great job of dealing with an emergency situation in a calm, timely fashion and were able to create an outcome that was acceptable to most of the party-goers. A special note of appreciation goes to our hosts, Steve and Christine Humphreys, whose flexibility and accessibility enabled us to handle the situation smoothly. Once we cancelled on the original date, they were willing to suggest several potential new dates and it was Steve's idea to poll the membership to choose the best alternative. Kudos also go to Jean and Elizabeth for offering guidance and suggestions.

We also had a potential weather cancellation for the Minstrel on Fri. Jan. 3. We sent out a special alert to the Minstrel-Gram list advising them that we might have to cancel and that we would let them know by

Friday afternoon. Then we sent out a second notice when it was determined that the Minstrel would go on as scheduled.

I'd like to give credit to Mark and Robin and the Festival committee for sending out a Holiday Greetings email to the festival announcements list. I thought this was a nice, friendly touch and a good way to remind people about the Festival during the long period before announcements begin ramping up for the next event in the spring.

Mike Agranoff has been sending a copy of the Minstrel flier each month via email to people who have volunteered to print it out and post it in various places in their neighborhood. Up until now he has managed this list privately. We have now migrated the list into Constant Contact and set up a template for Mike to use to create a new email each month. He will begin sending the email from CC starting with the February flier.

At the annual meeting Bob McNally asked me how many emails we send out each month and the number of recipients for each. According to CC, we sent out 30,585 individual emails in the past three months, so that's a bit over 10,000 per month.

Respectfully submitted,

Lori Falco